Reviving the past: the growth of citations to old documents

2015/01/09 by Alberto Martín‐Martín, Martín-Martín, Alberto, Enrique Orduña‐Malea +5
Computer Science · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Mathematics, Computing, and Information Processing #Semantic Web and Ontologies

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1501.02084

openalex publication_date 2015/01/09 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

In this Digest we review a recent study released by the Google Scholar team on the apparently increasing fraction of citations to old articles from studies published in the last 24 years (1990-2013). First, we describe the main findings of their article. Secondly, we conduct an analogue study, using a different data source as well as different measures which throw very similar results, thus confirming the phenomenon. Lastly, we discuss the possible causes of this phenomenon.

Citations

• Does Google Scholar contain all highly cited documents (1950-2013)?

Related

• Sic Transit Gloria Manuscriptum: Two Views of the Aggregate Fate of\n Ancient Papers
• On the Shoulders of Giants: The Growing Impact of Older Articles
• The decline in the concentration of citations, 1900-2007
• Citation classics published in Knowledge Management journals. Part II: studying research trends and discovering the Google Scholar Effect
• The changing role of cited papers over time: An analysis of highly cited papers based on a large full-text dataset