A model for reference list length of scholarly articles

We introduce and analyse a simple probabilistic model of article production and citation behavior that explicitly assumes that there is no decline in citability of a given article over time. It makes predictions about the number and age of items appearing in the reference list of an article. The latter topics have been studied before, but only in the context of data, and to our knowledge no models have been presented. We then perform large-scale analyses of reference list length for a variety of academic disciplines. The results show that our simple model cannot be rejected, and indeed fits the aggregated data on reference lists rather well. Over the last few decades, the relationship between total publications and mean reference list length is linear to a high level of accuracy. Although our model is clearly an oversimplification, it will likely prove useful for further modeling of the scholarly literature. Finally, we connect our work to the large literature on “aging” or “obsolescence” of scholarly publications, and argue that the importance of that area of research is no longer clear, while much of the existing literature is confused and confusing.