Modeling the obsolescence of research literature in disciplinary journals through the age of their cited references

TL;DR

This study models the obsolescence of research literature in disciplinary journals across eight scientific subfields using citation distribution analysis and proposes new measures to understand citation decay over time.

Contribution

It introduces novel measures for analyzing citation obsolescence tails and compares obsolescence patterns across disciplines using statistical models.

Findings

Significant differences in obsolescence patterns between disciplines.

Proposed measures effectively capture citation tail behavior.

Obsolescence varies notably even within the same subfield.

Abstract

There are different citation habits in the research fields that influence the obsolescence of the research literature. We analyze the distinctive obsolescence of research literature in disciplinary journals in eight scientific subfields based on cited references distribution, as a synchronous approach. We use both Negative Binomial (NB) and Poisson distributions to capture this obsolescence. The corpus being examined is published in 2019 and covers 22,559 papers citing 872,442 references. Moreover, three measures to analyze the tail of the distribution are proposed: (i) cited reference survival rate, (ii) cited reference mortality rate, and (iii) cited reference percentile. These measures are interesting because the tail of the distribution collects the behavior of the citations at the time when the document starts to get obsolete in the sense that it is little cited (used). As main conclusion, the differences observed in obsolescence are so important even between disciplinary journals in the same subfield, that it would be necessary to use some measure for the tail of the citation distribution, such as those proposed in this paper, when analyzing in an appropriate way the long time impact of a journal.