Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

Persistent value of older scientific journal articles

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper discusses how to translate the well-confirmed phenomenon of increasing citation of older scientific literature into an argument for the persistent citation impact of older scientific journal articles. Since libraries purchase or subscribe to scientific journal articles in packages consisting of journal-years, the citation impact of past journal-years needs to be assessed separately from that of recent years. The simple and flexible (Bouabid in Scientometrics 88:199–211, 2011. doi:10.1007/s11192-011-0370-5) model, as applied to particular journal-years, is applied and assessed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Bouabid, H. (2011). Revisiting citation aging: A model for citation distribution and life-cycle prediction. Scientometrics, 88, 199–211. doi:10.1007/s11192-011-0370-5.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bouabid, H., & Larivière, V. (2013). The lengthening of papers’ life expectancy: A diachronous analysis. Scientometrics, 97, 695–717. doi:10.1007/s11192-013-0995-7.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Burrell, Q. L. (2002). The nth-citation distribution and obsolescence. Scientometrics, 53(3), 309–323. doi:10.1023/a:1014816911511.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Finardi, U. (2014). On the time evolution of received citations, in different scientific fields: An empirical study. Journal of Informetrics, 8, 13–24. doi:10.1016/j.joi.2013.10.003.

  • Glänzel, W. (2004). Towards a model for diachronous and synchronous citation analyses. Scientometrics, 60(3), 511–522. doi:10.1023/B:SCIE.0000034391.06240.2a.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Larivière, V., Archambault, E., & Gingras, Y. (2008). Long-term variations in the aging of scientific literature: From exponential growth to steady-state science (1900–2004). Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(2), 288–296. doi:10.1002/asi.20744.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spiess, A.-N., & Neumeyer, N. (2010). An evaluation of R 2 as an inadequate measure for nonlinear models in pharmacological and biochemical research: a Monte Carlo approach. BMC Pharmacology, 10(1), 1–11. doi:10.1186/1471-2210-10-6.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Verstak, A., Acharya, A., Suzuki, H., Henderson, S., Iakhiaev, M., Lin, C.C.Y., & Shetty, N. (2014). On the shoulders of giants: The growing impact of older articles. Retrieved from arXiv.org at arXiv:1411.0275

  • Yan, E., Ding, Y., Cronin, B., & Leyesdorff, L. (2013). A bird’s eye view of scientific trading: Dependency relations among fields of science. Journal of Informetrics, 7, 249–264.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 30 Middleton Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    Aaron Lercher

  2. Department of Mathematics, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    Lawrence Smolinsky

Authors
  1. Aaron Lercher
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Lawrence Smolinsky
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aaron Lercher.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lercher, A., Smolinsky, L. Persistent value of older scientific journal articles. Scientometrics 108, 1205–1220 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2011-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2011-5

Keywords