On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Stevan Harnad wrote:
[ Origin of statistics about the coverage of scientific literature by XXX ]
>
> Here's one way to estimate it for the physics arXiv: percentage of
> current citations by papers in within arXiv not papers not within
> arXiv (courtesy of Les Carr, Zhuoan Jiao, Tim Brody & Ian Hickmen):
>
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/Tim/sld003.htm
There are two questions:
1) What percentage of the _current_ output of literature is being arXived?
2) When looking for cited work, what percentage could I find in the
arXiv?
1) For High Energy Physics (for which statistics covering all published
work can be obtained from SPIRES), the percentage of papers arXived is
almost 100%. I have no data to cover other areas, but it must be noted
that most areas of XXX are seeing increased depositing, whereas HEP is
almost static. I would hypothesise that this is because other areas do not
have a high percentage of all literature being archived.
2) For the whole of the archive this is around 30-40% (with the HEPs
having a larger percent), with the result that it will be another 10 years
before all cited work has been archived (assuming the typical lifespan of
a paper is 5-7 years). This length of time could be reduced by authors
archiving existing literature.
All the best,
Tim Brody
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT