20
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      How Are Academic Age, Productivity and Collaboration Related to Citing Behavior of Researchers?

      research-article
      *
      PLoS ONE
      Public Library of Science

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          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.

          Related collections

          Most cited references3

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          NETWORKS OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS.

          D. Price (1965)
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            The Effects of Aging on Researchers' Publication and Citation Patterns

            The average age at which U.S. researchers receive their first grant from NIH has increased from 34.3 in 1970, to 41.7 in 2004. These data raise the crucial question of the effects of aging on the scientific productivity and impact of researchers. Drawing on a sizeable sample of 6,388 university professors in Quebec who have published at least one paper between 2000 and 2007, our results identify two turning points in the professors' careers. A first turning point is visible at age 40 years, where researchers start to rely on older literature and where their productivity increases at a slower pace—after having increased sharply since the beginning of their career. A second turning point can be seen around age 50, when researchers are the most productive whereas their average scientific impact is at its lowest. Our results also show that older professors publish fewer first-authored papers and move closer to the end of the list of co-authors. Although average scientific impact per paper decreases linearly until about age 50, the average number of papers in highly cited journals and among highly cited papers rises continuously until retirement. Our results show clearly that productivity and impact are not a simple and declining function of age and that we must take into account the collaborative aspects of scientific research. Science is a collective endeavor and, as our data shows, researchers of all ages play a significant role in its dynamic.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              Persuasive communities: a longitudinal analysis of references in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1665-1990.

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2012
                7 November 2012
                : 7
                : 11
                : e49176
                Affiliations
                [1]School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America
                Aalto University, Finland
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: SM. Performed the experiments: SM. Analyzed the data: SM. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: SM. Wrote the paper: SM.

                Article
                PONE-D-12-23464
                10.1371/journal.pone.0049176
                3492318
                23145111
                c8d8487e-d252-4b5a-a8c3-0c3520c0eeb7
                Copyright @ 2012

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 2 August 2012
                : 9 October 2012
                Page count
                Pages: 13
                Funding
                The author has no funding or support to report.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Medicine
                Clinical Research Design
                Longitudinal Studies
                Retrospective Studies
                Mental Health
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Science Policy
                Research Assessment
                Bibliometrics
                Publication Practices
                Social and Behavioral Sciences
                Communications
                Journalism
                Media Studies
                Information Science

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

                Comments

                Comment on this article