Related papers: Attention decay in science
Scientific literature has been growing exponentially for decades, with publications from the last twenty years now comprising 60% of all academic output. While the impact of information overload on news and social-media consumption is…
This paper examines how the role of cited papers evolves over time by analyzing nearly 900 highly cited papers (HCPs) published between 2000 and 2016 and the full text of over 220,000 papers citing them. We investigate multiple citation…
A central question in science of science concerns how time affects citations. Despite the long-standing interests and its broad impact, we lack systematic answers to this simple yet fundamental question. By reviewing and classifying prior…
News and social media are widely used to disseminate science, but do they also help raise awareness of problems in research? This study investigates whether high levels of news and social media attention might accelerate the retraction…
Policies ensuring that research data are available on public archives are increasingly being implemented at the government [1], funding agency [2-4], and journal [5,6] level. These policies are predicated on the idea that authors are poor…
Whether a scientific paper is cited is related not only to the influence of its author(s) but also to the journal publishing it. Scientists, either proficient or tender, usually submit their most important work to prestigious journals which…
The use of citation counts to assess the impact of research articles is well established. However, the citation impact of an article can only be measured several years after it has been published. As research articles are increasingly…
A recent highly-publicized study by Park et al. (Nature 613: 138-144, 2023), claiming that science has become less disruptive over recent decades, represents an extraordinary achievement but with deceptive results. The measure of…
Nobel Prizes are commonly seen to be among the most prestigious achievements of our times. Based on mining several million citations, we quantitatively analyze the processes driving paradigm shifts in science. We find that groundbreaking…
Previous work indicates that over the past 20 years, the highest quality work have been published in an increasingly diverse and larger group of journals. In this paper we examine whether this diversification has also affected the handful…
This study examines the tendency to cite older work across 20 fields of study over 43 years (1980--2023). We put NLP's propensity to cite older work in the context of these 20 other fields to analyze whether NLP shows similar temporal…
As a simple means for comparing and - if possible - predicting scientific impacts of different researchers working in the same field, we suggest comparing their "sales curves". A sales curve is the number of citations of the researcher's…
Science progresses by building upon previous discoveries. It is commonly believed that the impact of scientific papers, as measured by citations, is positively correlated with the impact of past discoveries built upon. However, analyzing…
The past few centuries have witnessed a dramatic growth in scientific and technological knowledge. However, the nature of that growth - whether exponential or otherwise - remains controversial, perhaps partly due to the lack of quantitative…
The rate at which scholarly literature is being produced has been increasing at approximately 3.5 percent per year for decades. This means that during a typical 40 year career the amount of new literature produced each year increases by a…
Citations are commonly held to represent scientific impact. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence in support of this postulate that is central to research assessment exercises and Science of Science studies. Here, we report on…
In an article written five years ago [arXiv:0809.0522], we described a method for predicting which scientific papers will be highly cited in the future, even if they are currently not highly cited. Applying the method to real citation data…
To what extent is the citation rate of new papers influenced by the past social relations of their authors? To answer this question, we present a data-driven analysis of nine different physics journals. Our analysis is based on a two-layer…
We introduce and analyse a simple probabilistic model of article production and citation behavior that explicitly assumes that there is no decline in citability of a given article over time. It makes predictions about the number and age of…
The exponential increase in the number of scientific publications raises the question of whether the sciences are expanding into a fractured structure, making cross-field communication difficult. On the other hand, scientists may be…