Current impact of ceased journals: are they still alive?

Abstract

This article presents a citation analysis of papers published between 1909 and 1954 by two ceased journals covering the abandoned field of eugenics. The aim of the study was to investigate the visible signs of current scientific impact of these old papers and find out if they are significant for reasons other than historical referencing. Our survey involved a three-stage citation analysis using the Web of Science Core Collection and content analysis of the citing papers. The citation counts were collected and classified by the citing years. Papers that had 25 or more citations from 2000 to 2014 were selected for further analysis and examined for their citations in 2014. This produced 941 papers citing 24 papers published between 1915 and 1954, 23 of which were published by the Annals of Eugenics, and one by the Eugenics Review. Four of the cited articles accounted for 87 percent of all citations received. Due to not all citing papers (941) published in 2014 were available in full text, only 70 percent of them were analysed using content analysis technique to examine and classify the reasons for citing. The findings suggest that these old journals left a strong scientific imprint with papers whose impact has been increased in the last decades. They were less cited because of the scientific problems they addressed at the time of publishing. In contrast, these papers were cited due to their innovative research methodologies that have become valuable instruments in many scientific disciplines that emerged later. This study is significant in giving additional insight in the citation pattern of older papers.