A vector for measuring obsolescence of scientific articles

• Published in: Scientometrics 2016-05, Vol.107 (2), p.745-757
• Main Authors: Sun, Jianjun, Min, Chao, Li, Jiang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer Science; Information Storage and Retrieval; Library Science
• ISSN: 0138-9130; 1588-2861
• DOI: 10.1007/s11192-016-1884-7

Diachronous studies of obsolescence categorized articles into three general types: “flashes in the pan”, “sleeping beauties” and “normal articles”. These studies used either quartiles or averages to define thresholds on sleeping and awakening periods. However, such average- and quartile-based criteria, sometimes, are less effective in distinguishing “flashes in the pan” and “sleeping beauties” from normal articles due to the arbitrariness of the manner in which thresholds are determined. In this investigation, we propose a vector for measuring obsolescence of scientific articles as an alternative to these criteria. The obsolescence vector is designed as O  = ( G s , A − ), with G s as a parameter affecting the shape of citation curves and A − as a parameter detecting drastic fluctuation of citation curves. We collected 50,789 articles authored by Nobel laureates during 1900–2012. Applying our criteria to this dataset, we compared the obsolescence vector with average- and quartile-based criteria. Our findings show that the proposed obsolescence vector is different from and serves as an alternative to the average- and quartile-based criteria.