Departmental News
Fink Co-Authors Study of Academic Citations
Professor Edward L. Fink, with George A. Barnett of the University at Buffalo, has authored a study that examines the impact of the Internet and scholar age on academic citation age. The study appears in the February 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
The article examines the impact of the Internet and the age distribution of research scholars on academic citation age with a mathematical model proposed by Barnett, Fink, and Debus (1989) and a revised model that incorporates information about the online environment and scholar age distribution. The modified model fits the data well, accounting for 99.6% of the variance for science citations and 99.8% for social science citations. The Internet's impact on the aging process of academic citations has been very small, accounting for only 0.1% for the social sciences and 0.8% for the sciences. Rather than resulting in the use of more recent citations, the Internet appears to have lengthened the average life of academic citations by 6 to 8 months. The aging of scholars seems to have a greater impact, accounting for 2.8% of the variance for the sciences and 0.9% for the social sciences. However, because the diffusion of the Internet and the aging of the professoriate are correlated over this time period, differentiating their effects is somewhat problematic.
Citation: George A. Barnett & Edward L. Fink. "Impact of the Internet and Scholar Age Distribution on Academic Citation Age," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59 (2008): 526-534.
