Citing vs Cited Half-Life Asymmetry
A journal has two half-lives, and comparing them reveals its temporal personality. The cited half-life measures the median age of the articles the journal is cited for, capturing how long its own work stays useful. The citing half-life measures the median age of the references the journal's articles make, capturing how far back its authors reach. Burton and Kebler's 1960 half-life framework supplies the median-age machinery for both, and Ronald Rousseau's work on the temporal structure of journal citations underscores that incoming and outgoing citation streams age differently. When the two half-lives diverge, the asymmetry is informative: a journal whose work is cited for many years but which itself cites only recent literature sits at a fast research front yet produces durable results, while the reverse profile marks a synthesizing or archival journal. The asymmetry is the gap between how a journal is used and how it uses the literature.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Burton, R. E., & Kebler, R. W. (1960). The "half-life" of some scientific and technical literatures. American Documentation, 11(1), 18-22. · DOI 10.1002/asi.5090110105
- Rousseau, R. (1999). Temporal differences in self-citation rates of scientific journals. Scientometrics, 44(3), 521-531. · DOI 10.1007/BF02458493
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.