Publication boost in Web of Science journals and its effect on citation distributions

摘要

In this paper we show that the dramatic increase in the number of researcharticles indexed in the Web of Science database impacts the commonly observeddistributions of citations within these articles. First, we document that thegrowing number of physics articles in recent years is due to existing journalspublishing more and more papers rather than more new journals coming into beingas it happens in computer science. And second, even though the references fromthe more recent papers generally cover a longer time span, the newer papers arecited more frequently than the older ones if the uneven paper growth is notcorrected for. Nevertheless, despite this change in the distribution ofcitations, the citation behavior of scientists does not seem to have changed.