Gou, Z., Meng, F., Chinchilla-Rodríguez, Z. & Bu, Y. (2022). Encoding the citation life-cycle: the operationalization of a literature-aging conceptual model. Scientometrics

Abstract. In this study, we introduce a new literature-aging conceptual model to study the citation curve and discuss its implications. First, we improve the conceptual model by adding a period to describe the “death” of citations. Second, we offer a feasible operationalization for this conceptual model and implement a set of cross-discipline publications in the Web of Science to test its performance. Furthermore, we propose two measurements according to the new model—“Sleeping Period” and “Recognition Period”—to capture publications’ citation curve patterns.