Chemistry papers find themselves on the scrapheap quicker than physics ones

A new analysis of the ‘obsolescence’ of research papers across different fields shows that, on average, chemistry papers have shorter lifetimes than those in physics.

Pablo Dorta‑González and Emilio Gómez‑Déniz from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, analysed the references in almost 23,000 papers published in 2019 across eight different areas of research. In total, the articles cited almost 900,000 different studies from the last 150 years.