Highly cited old papers and the reasons why they continue to be cited
Abstract
This article describes a study to ascertain the reasons why certain old papers are still highly cited many years after their publication. Twenty‐three old papers in the subject fields of physics and physical chemistry which are still highly cited were selected, and 978 of the papers that cited them in the period 1974–1975 were studied. A new typology of reasons for citing the papers was devised, and using this typology, it was found that about 40% of the citations were for historical reasons, but that in the remaining 60% of the cases, the old paper is still begin actively used. We discuss some discrepancies between our citation figures and citation figures quoted by Garfield. We also discuss a number of errors which were found, both in citing articles and in Science Citation Index. Finally, calculations indicate that there is a rule that each cited paper is referred to, on average, 1.05‐1.15 times in every paper that cites it, and that this rule has general validity.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In physics and physical chemistry, 39 percent of citations to 23 highly-cited old papers were made for the purpose of providing historical background.
“The results of the citation content analyses in Table V (column 2) show that 39 percent of the citations were made for the purpose of providing historical background.”
From What do citation counts measure? A review of studies on citing behavior (2008) · cites this paper as Oppenheim and Renn (1978)
Cites
Content Analysis of References: Adjunct or Alternative to Citation Counting?
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Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
What do citation counts measure? A review of studies on citing behavior
Bornmann, L., & Daniel, H. (2008) · Journal of Documentation · doi:10.1108/00220410810844150 · Cited by 1,607 · see citing works
Baldi, S. (1998) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/2657504 · Cited by 335 · see citing works
An interview-based study of the functions of citations in academic writing across two disciplines
Harwood, N. (2009) · Journal of Pragmatics · doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2008.06.001 · Cited by 255 · see citing works
Measuring the Evolution of a Scientific Field through Citation Frames
Jurgens, D., Kumar, S., Hoover, R., McFarland, D., & Jurafsky, D. (2018) · Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00028 · Cited by 212 · see citing works
Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications
Cohan, A., Ammar, W., van Zuylen, M., & Cady, F. (2019) · Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/n19-1361 · Cited by 214 · see citing works
“There is a large body of work studying the intent of citations and devising categorization systems (Stevens and Giuliano, 1965; Moravcsik and Mu-rugesan, 1975; Garzone and Mercer, 2000; White, 2004; Ahmed et al., 2004; Teufel et al., 2006; Agarwal et al., 2010; Dong and Sch¨afer, 2011).”
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A quasi-quantitative citation model
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Characteristics of a literature as predictors of relatedness between cited and citing works
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Errors in Bibliographic Citations: A Continuing Problem
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A meta-analysis of semantic classification of citations
Kunnath, S. N., Herrmannova, D., Pride, D., & Knoth, P. (2021) · Quantitative Science Studies · doi:10.1162/qss_a_00159 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Oppenheim, C., & Renn, S. P.
- Affiliations
- City, University of London (GB)
- ORCID
- Oppenheim, Charles
- Venue
- Journal of the American Society for Information Science
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1978-09
- Volume
- 29
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 225-231
- ISSN
- 0002-8231 (ISSN-L)
- 1097-4571
- OpenAlex
- W1970559802
- Cited by
- 200
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 12 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 6 · 2013: 10 · 2012: 6
- FWCI
- 6.95
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of the American Society for Information Science (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychology Research and Bibliometrics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web visibility and informetrics
- Keywords
- citation patterns, highly cited papers, citation analysis, physics literature
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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