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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