On the Shoulders of Giants: The Growing Impact of Older Articles
Next in the 10th anniversary series, we look at the impact of older articles, and at how it had changed over the last several decades. A significant increase in the rate of publication over this time period might lead one to expect a corresponding decrease in the fraction of citations to older articles. However, this trend is counteracted by increasingly broad availability of archival content, and by universal availability of comprehensive relevance-ranked search. Overall, we found that the impact of older articles had grown over 1990-2013, and that the growth had accelerated over the second half of this time period. — Alex Verstak
