A bibliometric study on the ageing and content typology relationship of the biochemical literature

Abstract

Biochemical periodical literature is investigated in the light of its ageing phenomena as reflected by the citations in Cell in 1983. The citation frequency distribution followed a negative exponential distribution for 1972-1982, with the median cita tion age of 3 years. The relationship between ageing and content typologies of the literature was tested, the median citation ages of different typologies were uneven, with the differences of nearly 7 years, indicating that content typologies were an important factor affecting the ageing phenomena of the literature.

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