The DOI matches its Crossref record; 56 of the 56 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Deciphering death: a commentary on Gompertz (1825) ‘On the nature of the function expressive of the law of human mortality, and on a new mode of determining the value of life contingencies’
Open accessAbstract
In 1825, the actuary Benjamin Gompertz read a paper, ‘On the nature of the function expressive of the law of human mortality, and on a new mode of determining the value of life contingencies’, to the Royal Society in which he showed that over much of the adult human lifespan, age-specific mortality rates increased in an exponential manner. Gompertz's work played an important role in shaping the emerging statistical science that underpins the pricing of life insurance and annuities. Latterly, as the subject of ageing itself became the focus of scientific study, the Gompertz model provided a powerful stimulus to examine the patterns of death across the life course not only in humans but also in a wide range of other organisms. The idea that the Gompertz model might constitute a fundamental ‘law of mortality’ has given way to the recognition that other patterns exist, not only across the species range but also in advanced old age. Nevertheless, Gompertz's way of representing the function expressive of the pattern of much of adult mortality retains considerable relevance for studying the factors that influence the intrinsic biology of ageing. This commentary was written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society .
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
A Statistical Distribution Function of Wide Applicability
Weibull, W. (1951) · Journal of Applied Mechanics · doi:10.1115/1.4010337 · Cited by 11,604
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Fox, R. (2004) · Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · doi:10.1177/014107680409701118 · Cited by 3,997
Gompertz, B. (1825) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London · doi:10.1098/rstl.1825.0026 · Cited by 3,816
Broken Limits to Life Expectancy
Oeppen, J., & Vaupel, J. W. (2002) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1069675 · Cited by 2,819
Longevity, senescence and the genome
(1995) · General Pharmacology: The Vascular System · doi:10.1016/0306-3623(95)90026-8 · Cited by 1,405
Diversity of ageing across the tree of life
Jones, O. R., Scheuerlein, A., Salguero-Gómez, R., Camarda, C. G., Schaible, R., Casper, B. B., Dahlgren, J. P., Ehrlén, J., García, M. B., Menges, E. S., et al. (2014) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature12789 · Cited by 1,026
Feedback between p21 and reactive oxygen production is necessary for cell senescence
Passos, J. F., Nelson, G., Wang, C., Richter, T., Simillion, C., Proctor, C. J., Miwa, S., Olijslagers, S., Hallinan, J., Wipat, A., et al. (2010) · Molecular Systems Biology · doi:10.1038/msb.2010.5 · Cited by 1,019
Self-citationThe Gompertz Curve as a Growth Curve
Winsor, C. P. (1932) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.18.1.1 · Cited by 997
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(2014) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.52-0005 · Cited by 935
Vaupel, J. W. (2010) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature08984 · Cited by 863
Research works printed but not linked: 4
- 10.1007/s10522-008-9184-0 · doi:10.1007/s10522-008-9184-0
- 10.1007/978-3-642-81046-6 · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-81046-6
- 10.1007/978-3-642-82319-0 · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-82319-0
- Pearl R, 1922, A comparison of the laws of mortality in Drosophila and man, Am. Nat., 56, 398
Cited by
A standard procedure for creating a frailty index
Searle, S. D., Mitnitski, A., Gahbauer, E. A., Gill, T. M., & Rockwood, K. (2008) · BMC Geriatrics · doi:10.1186/1471-2318-8-24 · Cited by 3,568
The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001–2014
Chetty, R., Stepner, M., Abraham, S., Lin, S., Scuderi, B., Turner, N., Bergeron, A., & Cutler, D. (2016) · JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.2016.4226 · Cited by 2,812
DunedinPACE, a DNA methylation biomarker of the pace of aging
Belsky, D. W., Caspi, A., Corcoran, D. L., Sugden, K., Poulton, R., Arseneault, L., Baccarelli, A., Chamarti, K., Gao, X., Hannon, E., et al. (2022) · eLife · doi:10.7554/elife.73420 · Cited by 1,083
An Introduction to Markov Modelling for Economic Evaluation
Briggs, A., & Sculpher, M. (1998) · PharmacoEconomics · doi:10.2165/00019053-199813040-00003 · Cited by 960
Modeling causes of death: an integrated approach using CODEm
Foreman, K. J., Lozano, R., Lopez, A. D., & Murray, C. J. (2012) · Population Health Metrics · doi:10.1186/1478-7954-10-1 · Cited by 564
Metadata
- Authors
- Kirkwood, T. B. L.
- Venue
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2015-04-19
- Volume
- 370
- Issue
- 1666
- Pages
- 20140379
- ISSN
- 0962-8436 (ISSN-L)
- 1471-2970
- OpenAlex
- W2138904898
- Cited by
- 608
- References
- 56
- FWCI
- 131.07
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- Licence
- royalsociety.org/journals/ethics-policies/data-sharing-mining/ (tdm)
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 ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Deciphering death: a commentary on Gompertz (1825) ‘On the nature of the function expressive of the law of human mortality, and on a new mode of determining the value of life contingencies’. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1098/rstb.2014.0379
- The paper
- Kirkwood, T. B. L. (2015). Deciphering death: a commentary on Gompertz (1825) ‘On the nature of the function expressive of the law of human mortality, and on a new mode of determining the value of life contingencies’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0379
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
