The Life Cycle of Scholarly Articles across Fields of Research

Sebastian Galiani and Ramiro Gálvez

No 23447, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Aggregate citation behavior plays a key role in scientific knowledge diffusion, as citations document the collective and cumulative nature of knowledge production. Additionally, citations are commonly taken as input for several influential evaluative metrics used to assess researchers’ performance. Nevertheless, little effort has been devoted to understanding and quantifying how article citations evolve over the years following an article’s publication and how these trends vary across fields of research. By collecting and analyzing a dataset consisting of more than five million citations to 59,707 research articles from 12 dissimilar fields of research, we quantify how citations evolve across fields of research as articles grow older. Analyzing raw citation data spanning different periods poses several methodological challenges; to tackle them, we employ quantile regression, a technique that makes it possible to control for citation inflation (the fact that citations have become more common nowadays) and to take into consideration the well-known asymmetry in the distribution of citations. We find that citations follow a life-cycle pattern. In the first years after publication, articles generally receive a small but growing number of citations until, eventually, they reach a peak from which they then decline. Importantly, the shape of these life cycles varies greatly from one field to the next. Given that several influential metrics restrict their input to a certain range in terms of the number of years since publication, these differences are by no means neutral and should be taken into account when evaluating researchers or their institutions.

JEL-codes: B0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm and nep-sog
Note: DEV
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published as "An empirical approach based on quantile regression for estimation citation ageing." Journal of Infometrics, Volume 13, 2019, pages 738-750.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23447.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:23447

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23447

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().