TY - GEN

T1 - On Forgetting to Cite Older Papers

T2 - 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

AU - Bollmann, Marc Marcel

AU - Elliott, Desmond

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - The field of natural language processing is experiencing a period of unprecedented growth, and with it a surge of published papers. This represents an opportunity for us to take stock of how we cite the work of other researchers, and whether this growth comes at the expense of “forgetting” about older literature. In this paper, we address this question through bibliographic analysis. By looking at the age of outgoing citations in papers published at selected ACL venues between 2010 and 2019, we find that there is indeed a tendency for recent papers to cite more recent work, but the rate at which papers older than 15 years are cited has remained relatively stable.

AB - The field of natural language processing is experiencing a period of unprecedented growth, and with it a surge of published papers. This represents an opportunity for us to take stock of how we cite the work of other researchers, and whether this growth comes at the expense of “forgetting” about older literature. In this paper, we address this question through bibliographic analysis. By looking at the age of outgoing citations in papers published at selected ACL venues between 2010 and 2019, we find that there is indeed a tendency for recent papers to cite more recent work, but the rate at which papers older than 15 years are cited has remained relatively stable.

U2 - 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.699

DO - 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.699

M3 - Article in proceedings

SP - 7819

EP - 7827

BT - Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

PB - Association for Computational Linguistics

Y2 - 5 July 2020 through 10 July 2020

ER -