What is wrong with obsolescence?

Pedro Alvarez, Isabel Escalona and Antonio Pulgarín

Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 2000, vol. 51, issue 9, 812-815

Abstract: The growth of scientific output in recent years has meant that fewer libraries are able to offer the entire range of journals, with the others being forced to make a selection. The objective of the present work is to describe criteria to regulate the selection of these journals to provide the researcher with the information that is most being used in research. One form of quantifying this information is by way of the citations that papers receive over a period of time following their publication. Obsolescence, expressed in terms of an annual aging factor, does not reflect the real behaviour of most papers. An alternative is the use of “topicality,” considered as a latent variable, with the Rasch model as the measuring instrument. We considered 45 physics journals, and found the results of applying the Rasch model to be more satisfactory than those obtained with the annual aging factor.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(2000)51:93.0.CO;2-B

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamest:v:51:y:2000:i:9:p:812-815

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1097-4571

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().