The Coming of Age of E-Prints in the Literature of Physics.

Abstract

Examination of the role of e-prints in physics literature was conducted by citation analysis. Two databases were analyzed. Citation analysis was performed on e-prints from the Los Alamos e-print archive, arXiv.org, using the Stanford Public Information Retrieval System's High Energy Physics (SPIRES-HEP) and the Institute for Scientific Information's SciSearch databases. The SPIRES-HEP data represents citations to e-prints by e-prints while SciSearch data represents citations to e-prints by journal articles. Citations from 1991 to 1999 were examined. E-prints in the SPIRES-HEP database were cited approximately 10 times each by other e-prints, while those found in SciSearch were cited approximately 0.5 times each by journal articles. Despite this difference, the citation patterns were similar for both e-prints and journal articles. The citation rate by both e-prints and journals was highest from the high energy particle physics archives. The data from SPIRES-HEP indicates that e-prints are used to a greater extent by physicists than previously measured and that e-prints have become an integral and valid component of the literature of physics.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.