Two sides of the same coin? Citation obsolescence and impact of different publication types and subject fields

This study analyses the citation obsolescence behavior of different publication types in several research disciplines to discover the differences in ageing speed of scholarly publications between social sciences and other science fields, to determine if deviations are due to fields or publication types. Based on previous studies by the authors, several related indicators were applied to detect the differences and the overall citation life of all the types and fields was presented for a systematic comparison. The results of this study present that ageing patterns of information as measured by citation processes show kind of harmonization across different publication types and to a lesser extent across fields, while the citation impact still strongly differs both across both publication types and subject fields. The further discussion on the relation between the ageing/citation speed and impact of the publication types indicates the theoretically non necessary association between the two aspects, supported by the empirical results of this study. The findings are expected to benefit in designing and applying citation impact indicators to quantitative research for the fields not dominated by journals and can also provide as reference for scholars to choose preferred publication type to publish.