초록

Abstract

Electronic publishing has influenced, and in some ways changed, information seeking, reading patterns and citation behaviours. This study collected the Cited Half-Lives, the indicator implies the life-span of scholarly journals, from JCR Social Science edition the before and after of the prevalence of electronic journals, and observed if there are some changes in these two periods. The analysis results of eight disciplines show that the average Cited Half-Lives increased in 2007 than in 1994 for seven disciplines except the demography. Especially in the four disciplines of economics, education, finance and sociology, the average Cited Half-Lives increased significantly. This results show that the concentration, researchers cite more recent articles and concentrate their citations on fewer ones, is lightening and the dispersion of citations is actually increasing. With the online availability of articles and journals the old online materials can be often accessed, used and cited more frequently, the more growth potential of Cited Half-Lives are made in a digital environment. Further research needs to investigate if the phenomenon will become more obvious in various disciplines after a few years.