Publication boost in web of science journals and its effect on citation distributions

Abstract

In this article, we show that the dramatic increase in the number of research articles indexed in the Web of Science database impacts the commonly observed distributions of citations within these articles. First, we document that the growing number of physics articles in recent years is attributed to existing journals publishing more and more articles rather than more new journals coming into being as it happens in computer science. Second, even though the references from the more recent articles generally cover a longer time span, the newer articles are cited more frequently than the older ones if the uneven article growth is not corrected for. Nevertheless, despite this change in the distribution of citations, the citation behavior of scientists does not seem to have changed.