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(with the HEPs having a larger percent), with the result that it will be another 10 years before all cited work has been archived (assuming the typical lifespan of a paper is 5-7 years).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