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| Study on Time-dependent Regularity of the Percentage of Never-cited Papers in Journals from Library and Information Science Discipline |
| Hu Zewen1, Wu Yishan2, Gao Jiping3 |
1. School of Management Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044;
2. Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development, Beijing 100038;
3. Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), Beijing 100038 |
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Abstract The non-citation rate refers to the proportion of articles that do not receive a single citation within a given citation time frame after publication. The current literature on citation distribution focuses on the distribution of articles receiving at least one citation, while the time-dependent distribution of uncited articles is seldom studied. Therefore, a bibliometric analysis of time-dependent distribution of uncited library and information science (LIS) articles published in six journals with different impact factors is executed. We perform an empirical analysis of the time-dependent regularity of the percentages of uncited publications in different citation time-windows (0 to 19 years) following their publication during 1990-1993 period in six selected journals. Furthermore, we also analyze the annual distribution regularity of the percentages of uncited publications following their publication during 1990-2012. Through the above analysis, we found: (1) Time-dependent distribution curve of the percentages of uncited publications (excluding LIS publications) over 20 different citation time windows for five journals can be fitted well using a three-parameter negative exponential model: P(Xt=0)=K+Ae-S*t and the goodness of fit (R2) value for each journal is above 96%; (2) In the initial citation time window, the percentage of never-cited papers in each journal is very high. However, as the citation time window becomes wider, the percentage of never-cited papers (excluding LIS papers) for five journals, begins to drop rapidly at first, and then drops slowly, approaching a very low stably horizontal line after going through an infinitely long citation period. In addition, the total degree of decline for these five journals is very large. Furthermore, the change in the sleep coefficient "S" values for these five journals has the same direction as the change in dropping amplitude values for percentages of uncited publications as the time elapsed. This means that when percentages of uncited publications drop more quickly to a very low stably horizontal line with very few changes, the publications that have not been cited will have a longer sleeping status, until they are woken up or found; (3) Annual distribution regularity of the percentages of uncited publications for six journals reveals that the speed of spread and utilization of publications have increased due to the development of science and technology. As an illustration, annual distribution regularity of the percentages of uncited publications (excluding LIS publications) for five journals have shown a continuous dropping trend, although there is a big annual fluctuation. The percentages of uncited publications for LIS have shown a very high value and very low annual change.
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Received: 05 July 2017
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