Attention decay in science

Abstract

The exponential growth in the number of scientific papers makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of all the publications relevant to their work. Consequently, the attention that can be devoted to individual papers, measured by their citation counts, is bound to decay rapidly. In this work we make a thorough study of the life-cycle of papers in different disciplines. Typically, the citation rate of a paper increases up to a few years after its publication, reaches a peak and then decreases rapidly. This decay can be described by an exponential or a power law behavior, as in ultradiffusive processes, with exponential fitting better than power law for the majority of cases. The decay is also becoming faster over the years, signaling that nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly. However, when time is counted in terms of the number of published papers, the rate of decay of citations is fairly independent of the period considered. This indicates that the attention of scholars depends on the number of published items, and not on real time.

Dynamics and biases of online attention: the case of aircraft crashes

“…After the initial boost in viewership, which in 73% of the cases happens in less than 5 days after the date of the page creation, an exponential decay follows (see figure 4 for an example). This phenomenon also occurs both because of the decay of novelty [4] as well as limitations in human capacity to pay attention to older items in competition with newer ones [24].

Figure 4.Typical example of the viewership time-series of a Wikipedia article related to an airplane crash fitted with segmented regression with two break points.

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Science of science

“…Power-law tails can be generated through a cumulative advantage process (74), known as preferential attachment in network science (75), suggesting that the probability of citing a paper grows with the number of citations that it has already collected. Such a model can be augmented with other characteristic features of citation dynamics, such as the obsolescence of knowledge, decreasing the citation probability with the age of the paper (76–79), and a fitness parameter, unique to each paper, capturing the appeal of the work to the scientific community (77, 78). Only a tiny fraction of papers deviate from the pattern described by such a model—some of which are called “sleeping beauties,” because they receive very little notice for decades after publication and then suddenly receive a burst of attention and citations (80, 81).…”

A bibliometric approach for managing institutional and personal scientific investments, with examples from the biological sciences

“…1 & 2). One caution in interpreting large proportional jumps in the time-corrected values is that attention to publications shows early spikes and then wanes over time (Parolo et al 2015). Thus, recent activity can disproportionately affect apparent importance, particularly in sectors that don't have a long legacy of publications to ameliorate these effects.…”