Comments on: Calling all Demographers

By: gabrielrossman

gabrielrossman — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 04:58:37 +0000

Or it could just be that there’s a single citation to “Plato. -380. Πολιτεία.” or something.

By: jimi adams

jimi adams — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:35:17 +0000

Yeah, special issues are definitely potentially important especially for things like this. That doesn't appear to be accounting for these two cases. There's only one i see explicitly as a "stand alone" special issue in either of those years - on British Demography which doesn't appear to be accounting for the 1991 blip (the citation ages from those papers are actually younger than the over-represented slice from the 20s, i.e., didn't seem to be doing much to shift the distribution). So more "hidden" symposia are what i'm hoping to dig up.

By: jimi adams

jimi adams — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:33:21 +0000

The 1991 blip definitely is coming from before 1931. Closer to the teens and early 20s. I’m guessing those years would help point you to the story i’m currently trying to dig through.

By: jimi adams

jimi adams — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:29:46 +0000

Yeah, i missed your point the first time. That paper in PDR may go a long way to accounting for that blip (needed an excess ~100 papers with citations in the 20s). I had been hoping it was something (more interesting?) like HIV researchers who were citing the 1918 flu epidemic.

By: James Holland Jones

James Holland Jones — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:13:27 +0000

But those are possibly the years that are going to inform the founding of the association, no?

By: James Holland Jones

James Holland Jones — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:01:18 +0000

PAA was founded in 1931, making 1991 the 70th anniversary and probably accounting for that outlier. I know that there are a couple of review papers addressing this (e.g., Hodgson’s PDR paper on the ideological origins of PAA) and such. Review papers can definitely skew citation statistics so a year where there are several of them, all citing documents surrounding the founding of the association may be driving it. Not so sure about 1988…

By: Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 19:50:59 +0000

Cool puzzle jimi! I wonder if a special journal volume dedicated to something which requires older references could pull the means up like that.