Re: Number of pre-prints relative to journal literature?
I am curious about the statistics concerning the number of e-prints relative to the journal literature. Harnad repeatedly mentions that LANL archive contains 40% of the journal literature at present and compares it to 20% of the math archive. 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 other ways to estimate it too. See: http://opcit.eprints.org/ijh198/ http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/ For an estimate of what percentage of the current maths literature is in the maths arXiv, I will let Greg Kuperberg reply. Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Sciencehar...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southamptonhttp://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Re: Number of pre-prints relative to journal literature?
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
