What Do Chemists Cite? A 5-year Analysis of References Cited in American Chemical Society Journal Articles

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes references cited by articles published in ten American Chemical Society journals between 2011 and 2015. The median age of references was 6 years. On average, 44 percent of the references were five years old or younger, and only 11 percent were more than 20 years old. There appears to be a modest increase in references to older sources, possibly due to the increased availability of older articles online. References tended to be concentrated on a small core of journals. Overall, 20 percent of the journals cited accounted for 80 percent of the references. However, there was considerable variation among sub-disciplines.

KEYWORDS:

• Citation analysis
• collection development
• obsolescence
• Pareto Rule
• reference age

Acknowledgments

We thank Seton Hall graduate students Lauren Ridley-Hoffman and Anglin Thevarajah for their assistance with data sampling and extraction. We also thank ACS representative Bruce Carey for providing usage and turnaway statistics, Seton Hall systems librarian Xue-Ming Bao for providing interlibrary loan data, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Seton Hall University Research Grant made jointly to the authors.