Citation Amnesia: NLP and Other Academic Fields Are in a Citation Age Recession

arXiv:2402.12046v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: This study examines the tendency to cite older work across 20 fields of study over 43 years (1980--2023). We put NLP's propensity to cite older work in the context of these 20 other fields to analyze whether NLP shows similar temporal citation patterns to these other fields over time or whether differences can be observed. Our analysis, based on a dataset of approximately 240 million papers, reveals a broader scientific trend: many fields have markedly …

abstract academic age analyze arxiv context cs.cl cs.dl fields nlp recession shows study temporal type work