How are academic age, productivity and collaboration related to citing behavior of researchers?

Abstract

References are an essential component of research articles and therefore of scientific communication. In this study we investigate referencing (citing) behavior in five diverse fields (astronomy, mathematics, robotics, ecology and economics) based on 213,756 core journal articles. At the macro level we find: (a) a steady increase in the number of references per article over the period studied (50 years), which in some fields is due to a higher rate of usage, while in others reflects longer articles and (b) an increase in all fields in the fraction of older, foundational references since the 1980s, with no obvious change in citing patterns associated with the introduction of the Internet. At the meso level we explore current (2006-2010) referencing behavior of different categories of authors (21,562 total) within each field, based on their academic age, productivity and collaborative practices. Contrary to some previous findings and expectations we find that senior researchers use references at the same rate as their junior colleagues, with similar rates of re-citation (use of same references in multiple papers). High Modified Price Index (MPI, which measures the speed of the research front more accurately than the traditional Price Index) of senior authors indicates that their research has the similar cutting-edge aspect as that of their younger colleagues. In all fields both the productive researchers and especially those who collaborate more use a significantly lower fraction of foundational references and have much higher MPI and lower re-citation rates, i.e., they are the ones pushing the research front regardless of researcher age. This paper introduces improved bibliometric methods to measure the speed of the research front, disambiguate lead authors in co-authored papers and decouple measures of productivity and collaboration.

Accepted for publication in PLoS ONE

References in corpus (4)

• The effects of aging of scientists on their publication and citation patterns
• Power-law Distributions in Information Science - Making the Case for Logarithmic Binning
• Modes of Collaboration in Modern Science - Beyond Power Laws and Preferential Attachment
• E-prints and Journal Articles in Astronomy: a Productive Co-existence

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• Practical method to reclassify Web of Science articles into unique subject categories and broad disciplines
• Author-Based Analysis of Conference versus Journal Publication in Computer Science
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• No Deal: Investigating the Influence of Restricted Access to Elsevier Journals on German Researchers' Publishing and Citing Behaviours
• Building connections: How scientists meet each other during a conference
• Leveraging GANs for citation intent classification and its impact on citation network analysis
• Publishing Instincts: An Exploration-Exploitation Framework for Studying Academic Publishing Behavior and "Home Venues"
• Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy applied to iMetrics: Scientometrics, Journal of Informetrics, and a relevant subset of JASIST
• Research Method Usage across Academic Ages in Library and Information Science: An Empirical Study (1990-2023)