# A simple analysis of Reference lists of 10 PLOS ONE Paleontology papers

None
Embed*
Cite this:

Mounce, Ross (2013): A simple analysis of Reference lists of 10 PLOS ONE Paleontology papers. figshare.

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.106815
Retrieved 09:43, Aug 04, 2015 (GMT)

## Description

I wanted to see what the mean & median age cited papers in paleontology reference lists were.

To this end in a simple 5 minute excercise I looked at 10 Open Access PLOS ONE paleontology papers all published in 2009 and parsed just the reference list in the main paper to see how old each of the referenced articles were.

method: cut n paste reference list into text file & apply sed -n -e '/^[^(]*($$[^)]*$$).*/s//\1/p'

(not quite perfect parsing but it'll do)

in press  references I manually converted to '2009'

RESULTS:

In the PLOS ONE Paleontology papers I sampled, the mean-age of cited papers was >18 years from the publication date of the citing paper, whilst the median-age of cited papers are >10 years from the publication data of the citing paper.

It would be interesting to compare this data to data of other journals in other fields.

• If you plot the median age of the articles cited by each article the plot looks like this:

0

1

2

3

4

6  ###

7

8  #

9  #

10

11 ##

12

13 #

14

.

.

.

22 #

The mean is going to be horribly skewed by including old papers (there is a softish limit of 200-300 years for oldest paper, but a hard limit for the youngest). Obviously it's a small sample size, but a lot of cited papers are fairly recent. Given the nature of the data I think sumamry stats are going to be less enlightening than looking at distributions.

15/01/2013    by R. Page

You must be logged in to post comments.

379
views

2
shares

Published on 15 Jan 2013 - 14:14 (GMT)

Filesize is 16.11 KB

CC-BY

## Export

### Cite "Filename"

Place your mouse over the citation text to select it

### Embed "A simple analysis of Reference lists of 10 PLOS ONE Paleontology papers"

Place your mouse over the embed code to select and copy it

# Claim article

You claim request was sent. I will be handled in the next 24 hours.

Close window