The effects of aging on researchers' publication and citation patterns

PLoS ONE

Volumn 3, Issue 12, 2008, Pages

  Gingras, Yves ^a   Larivière, Vincent ^a   Macaluso, Benoît ^a   Robitaille, Jean Pierre ^a  

^a UNIVERSITÉ DU QUÉBEC À MONTRÉAL   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADULT; AGE DISTRIBUTION; AGED; AGING; ARTICLE; AWARDS AND PRIZES; CANADA; CAREER MOBILITY; CITATION ANALYSIS; CONTROLLED STUDY; HUMAN; JOB PERFORMANCE; PRODUCTIVITY; PUBLICATION; RETIREMENT; SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE; TASK PERFORMANCE; MEDICAL RESEARCH; MIDDLE AGED; NATIONAL HEALTH ORGANIZATION; PERSONNEL; PUBLISHING; UNITED STATES; UNIVERSITY; WRITING;

ADULT; AGED; AGING; AUTHORSHIP; BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH; HUMANS; MIDDLE AGED; NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH (U.S.); PERIODICALS AS TOPIC; PUBLICATIONS; PUBLISHING; QUEBEC; RESEARCH PERSONNEL; UNITED STATES; UNIVERSITIES;

EID: 58149177148     PISSN: None     EISSN: 19326203     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004048     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Holden C (2008) The incredible aging investigator. Science 31: 391.
2. Numbers are available at: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/new_investigators/ resources.htm Accessed on March 3, 2008.
3. Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (2007) Trends in Higher Education-Volume 2: Faculty. Ottawa: Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. 49 p.
4. Lehman HC (1953) Age and Achievement. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 359 p.
5. For a good review of the topic, see Feist GJ (2006) The psychology of science and the origins of the scientific mind. New Haven: Yale University Press. 316 p.
6. Adams CW (1946) The age at which scientists do their best work. Isis 36: 166-169.
7. Zuckerman H, Merton RK (1973) Age, aging and age structure in science. In Merton RK, ed. The Sociology of Science. Chicago: Chicago University Press. pp 493-560.
8. Zuckerman H (1977) Scientific elite: Nobel laureates in the United States. New York: The Free Press. 335 p.
9. Dietrich A, Srinivasan N (2007) The optimal age to start a revolution. J Creative Behav 41: 339-351.
10. Shinn T (1988) Hiérarchie des chercheurs et formes de recherches. Act Rech Sci Soc 74: 2-22.
11. Simonton DK (1994) Greatness: Who makes history and why. New York: Guilford Press. 502 p.
12. Stern S (1978) Age and achievement in mathematics: A Case-Study in the Sociology of Science. Soc Stud Sci 8: 127-140.
13. Gieryn TF (1981) The aging of a science and its exploitation of innovation: Lessons from X-ray and radio astronomy. Scientometrics 3: 325-334.
14. Over R (1988) Does scholarly impact decline with age? Scientometrics 13: 215-223.
15. Horner KL, Rushton JP, Vernon PA (1986) Relation between aging and research productivity of academic psychologists. Psychology and Aging 1: 319-324.
16. Cole S (1979) Age and Scientific Performance. Am J Soc 84: 958-977.
17. Dennis W (1956) Age and productivity among scientists. Science 123: 724-725.
18. Wray KB (2003) Is science really a young man's game? Soc Stud Sci 33: 137-149.
19. Wray KB (2004) An examination of the contributions of young scientists in new fields. Scientometrics 61: 117-128.
20. Kyvik S, Olsen TB (2008) Does the aging of tenured academic staff affect the research performance of universities? Scientometrics 76: 439-455.
21. Allison PD, Steward JA (1974) Productivity differences among scientists: evidence for accumulative advantage. Am Soc Rev 39: 596-606.
22. Simonton DK (1984) Creative productivity and age: A mathematical model based on a two-step cognitive process. Developmental Rev 4: 77-111.
23. Simonton DK (1997) A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks. Psycho Rev 104: 251-267.
24. Kuhn TS (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 171 p.
25. Merton RK (1973) The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investivations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 605 p.
26. Merton RK (1968) Social theory and social structure. New York: The Free Press. 702 p.
27. Bourdieu P (1975) The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason. Social Science Information 14: 19-47.
28. CREPUQ (2006) Le système universitaire québécois: données et indicateurs. Québec: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. 120 p.
29. See: http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/products/scie; http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/products/ssci; http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/products/ahci.
30. Garfield E (1990) How ISI selects journals for coverage: Quantitative and qualitative consideration. Essays of an Information Scientist 13: 185-193.
31. For an analysis of the difference of coverage between sciences and social science see Larivière V, Archambault E, Gingras Y, Vignola-Gagné E (2006) The place of serials in referencing practices: Comparing natural sciences and engineering with social sciences and humanities. JASIST 57: 997-1004
32. Archambault E, Vignola-Gagné E, Côté G, Larivière V, Gingras Y (2006) Benchmarking scientific output in the social sciences and humanities: The limits of existing databases. Scientometrics 68: 329-342.
33. Moed HF (1996) Differences in the construction of SCI based bibliometric indicators among various producers: a first overview. Scientometrics 35: 177-191.
34. The SCI only indexes surname and initials of authors, which creates a high number of potential namesakes.
35. Price DJD (1970) Citation measures of hard science, soft science, technology, and nonscience. In Nelson CE, Pollack DK, eds. Communication among scientists and engineers. New York: Columbia University Press. pp 155-179.
36. This might the fact that the age of cited literature has been increasing steadily since the seventies. See: Larivière V, Archambault E, Gingras Y (2008) Long-term variations in the aging of scientific literature: From exponential growth to steady-state science (1900-2004). JASIST 59: 288-296.
37. Barnett GA, Fink EL (2008) Impact of the internet and scholar age distribution on academic citation age. JASIST 59: 526-534.
38. It is a well know fact that, in the calculation of their impact factors, Thomson Scientific counts citations received by all document types published (articles reviews, editorials, news items, etc.) but then only divides these citations by the number of articles and reviews published, which are considered as "citable" items. This has the effect of artificially increasing the impact factor of journals with a higher ratio of "non-citable" items. For a historical review of impact factors' limits see: Archambault E, Larivière V (2009) History of the journal impact factor: Contingencies and consequences. Scientometrics. 79. In press.
39. Moed HF, De Bruin RE, van Leeuwen ThN (1995) New bibliometric tools for the assessment of national research performance: database description, overview of indicators and first applications. Scientometrics 33: 381-422.
40. Schubert A, Braun T (1986) Relative indicators and relational charts for comparative assessment of publication output and citation impact. Scientometrics 9: 281-291.
41. Sigogneau A (2000) An analysis of document types published in journals related to physics: Proceeding papers recorded in the Science Citation Index database. Scientometrics 47(3): 589-604.
42. Biagioli M, Galison P (2003) Scientific authorship: Credit and intellectual property in science. New York: Routledge. 396 p.
43. Birnholtz J (2006) What does it mean to be an author? The intersection of credit, contribution and collaboration in science. JASIST 57: 1758-1770.
44. Pontille D (2004) La signature scientifique: Une sociologie pragmatique de l'attribution. Paris: CNRS Éditions. 200 p.
45. Merton RK (1968) The Matthew effect in science. Science 159: 56-63.
46. Liang L, Guo Y, Davis M (2001) Collaborative patterns and age structures in Chinese publications. Scientometrics 54: 473-489.
47. Kaiser J (2008) The graying of NIH research. Science 322: 848-849.