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The lengthening of papers’ life expectancy: a diachronous analysis

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Abstract

The aging of scientific has generally been studied using synchronous approaches, i.e., based on references made by papers. This paper uses a diachronous model based on citations received by papers to study the changes in the life expectancy of three corpus of papers: papers from G6 and BRICS countries, papers published in Science, Nature, Physical Review and the Lancet and all papers divided into four broad fields: medical sciences, natural sciences and engineering, social sciences and arts and humanities. It shows that that: (i) life expectancy is extensively different from a corpus to another and may be either finite or infinite, meaning that the corpus would never be obsolete from a mathematical perspective; (ii) life expectancy for scientific literature has lengthened over the 1980–2000 period; (iii) life expectancy of developed countries’ (G6) literature is on average shorter than that of emerging countries (BRICS).

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Notes

  1. An extensive discussion of the topic can be found in Line (1993) and Line and Sandison (1974).

  2. http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=1530.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Science, Mohammed V - Agdal University, 4, Avenue Ibn Battouta B.P, 1014, Rabat, Morocco

    Hamid Bouabid

  2. École de bibliothéconomie et des Sciences de l’information, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, QC, H3C 3J7, Canada

    Vincent Larivière

  3. Observatoire des Sciences et des Technologies (OST), Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST), Université du Québec à Montréal, CP 8888, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, QC, H3C 3P8, Canada

    Vincent Larivière

Authors
  1. Hamid Bouabid
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  2. Vincent Larivière
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Correspondence to Hamid Bouabid.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

Table 1 Citations distributions of countries, journals and fields for the time series: 1980, 1985, 1990 and 2000
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Table 2 R² of the model to the observed data of SCI for countries for journals and fields
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Table 3 Parameters results of the model for countries
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Table 4 parameters results of the model for journals
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Table 5 Parameters results of the model for scientific fields
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Bouabid, H., Larivière, V. The lengthening of papers’ life expectancy: a diachronous analysis. Scientometrics 97, 695–717 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-0995-7

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