方法对比

	Price Index (Citation Recency)	Citation Half-Life and Literature Obsolescence
领域	文献计量学	文献计量学
方法族	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
起源年份	1970	1960
提出者	Derek J. de Solla Price	Robert E. Burton & R. W. Kebler; Maurice B. Line
类型	Reference-recency pipeline	Citation-aging pipeline
开创性文献	Price, D. J. de Solla (1965). Networks of scientific papers. Science, 149(3683), 510-515.	Burton, R. E., & Kebler, R. W. (1960). The "half-life" of some scientific and technical literatures. American Documentation, 11(1), 18-22.
别名	Price's Index, Citation Recency Index, Share of Recent References, Research-Front Index	Literature Half-Life, Literature Obsolescence, Citation Aging, Literature Decay Rate
相关	3	3
摘要	The Price Index measures how strongly a field draws on recent literature by computing the percentage of its references that point to work published within the last few years. Derek de Solla Price, the founder of modern scientometrics, observed that the sciences differ sharply in how immediate their referencing is: hard sciences cite a tight cloud of recent papers at the research front, while humanities scholarship cites a long, even spread of older works. In his 1965 Science paper on the networks of scientific papers he documented this concentration of references on recent years, and in his 1970 essay distinguishing hard science, soft science, technology, and nonscience he formalized the index that now bears his name. Defined as the share of references no older than about five years, the Price Index is a citing-side companion to obsolescence measures: where the cited half-life looks at how the literature ages, the Price Index looks at how recency-focused the citing behavior is.	Citation half-life measures how quickly a body of literature ages by finding the median age of the documents being cited. Borrowing the metaphor of radioactive decay, Robert Burton and R. W. Kebler proposed in 1960 that scientific literatures grow obsolete at characteristic rates, and that the half-life, the time within which half of the currently used references were published, summarizes this aging. A short half-life means a field draws mostly on recent work and old papers fall out of use quickly; a long half-life means older literature stays relevant. Maurice Line's 1970 critique drew a crucial distinction between apparent obsolescence, the decline in citations to older work, and real obsolescence, separating the genuine decline in a paper's usefulness from the statistical artifact created by the rapid growth of the literature, which makes recent years appear disproportionately important simply because there are more of them.