Unraveling the dynamics of growth, aging and inflation for citations to scientific articles from specific research fields

•Inflation-adjusted citation rates separate into independent growth and aging parts.•Normalizing by journal-specific article-publication rates accounts for inflation.•The citation-number-dependent growth exhibits superlinear preferential attachment.•Obsolescence-induced aging is an exponential funct...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of informetrics 2017-11, Vol.11 (4), p.1190-1200
Main Authors: Higham, K.W., Governale, M., Jaffe, A.B., Zülicke, U.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citation dynamics
Citation inflation
Complex networks
Obsolescence
Preferential attachment
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Summary:•Inflation-adjusted citation rates separate into independent growth and aging parts.•Normalizing by journal-specific article-publication rates accounts for inflation.•The citation-number-dependent growth exhibits superlinear preferential attachment.•Obsolescence-induced aging is an exponential function of time in the long term.•Growth and aging parameters show interesting variations between research fields. We analyze the time evolution of citations acquired by articles from journals of the American Physical Society (PRA, PRB, PRC, PRD, PRE and PRL). The observed change over time in the number of papers published in each journal is considered an exogenously caused variation in citability that is accounted for by a normalization. The appropriately inflation-adjusted citation rates are found to be separable into a preferential-attachment-type growth kernel and a purely obsolescence-related (i.e., monotonously decreasing as a function of time since publication) aging function. Variations in the empirically extracted parameters of the growth kernels and aging functions associated with different journals point to research-field-specific characteristics of citation intensity and knowledge flow. Comparison with analogous results for the citation dynamics of technology-disaggregated cohorts of patents provides deeper insight into the basic principles of information propagation as indicated by citing behavior.
ISSN:1751-1577
1875-5879
DOI:10.1016/j.joi.2017.10.004