Revisiting the Obsolescence Process of Individual Scientific Publications: Operationalisation and a Preliminary Cross-discipline Exploration

Literature obsolescence has been widely studied in scientometrics. Yet, most existing research has studied a set of publications (e.g., those in a certain discipline or a certain journal; the macro-level analyses) instead of each individual publication (e.g., the micro-level analyses). Among micro-level analyses, Bailon-Moreno et al. (2005) proposed a model by dividing the citation "life cycle" into four periods. Yet, their model remains on a conceptualisation level. To this end, the current paper shows a feasible way of operationalising their model and of implementing a set of cross-discipline publications in the Web of Science database to test its performance. In the operationalisation, we are particularly interested in two stages of literature ageing, namely the sleeping period (SP) and the recognition period (RP). We find that 50% publications in Arts & Humanities almost receive no citations in the first five years after their publication; and the distribution of SP and RP varies a lot in different disciplines. Obsolescence differences among publications could shed light on many useful political implications.