The lengthening of papers’ life expectancy: a diachronous analysis

Hamid Bouabid () and Vincent Larivière ()
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Hamid Bouabid: Mohammed V - Agdal University
Vincent Larivière: Université de Montréal

Scientometrics, 2013, vol. 97, issue 3, No 11, 695-717

Abstract: Abstract The aging of scientific has generally been studied using synchronous approaches, i.e., based on references made by papers. This paper uses a diachronous model based on citations received by papers to study the changes in the life expectancy of three corpus of papers: papers from G6 and BRICS countries, papers published in Science, Nature, Physical Review and the Lancet and all papers divided into four broad fields: medical sciences, natural sciences and engineering, social sciences and arts and humanities. It shows that that: (i) life expectancy is extensively different from a corpus to another and may be either finite or infinite, meaning that the corpus would never be obsolete from a mathematical perspective; (ii) life expectancy for scientific literature has lengthened over the 1980–2000 period; (iii) life expectancy of developed countries’ (G6) literature is on average shorter than that of emerging countries (BRICS).

Keywords: Aging; Obsolescence; Life expectancy; Life-time; Citation distribution; Diachronous; Synchronous; Journals; Countries; Fields (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-013-0995-7

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