{"doi":"10.5281/zenodo.10031968","title":"The Fall of Uncitedness","abstract":"It is a widely held belief, [HAMILTON 1990; 1991] that most scientific articles are never cited. Though several authors [PENDLEBURY 1991, ABT 1991, GARFIELD 1998] challenged this belief by showing that papers uncited after 5 years represented only 25% of the literature in the sciences, this taken for granted common lore comes back periodically in the literature [MEHO, 2008; MACDONALD and KAM, 2007; COLLINS, 2004, p.364]. Though several empirical study have been made on uncitedness rates [SCHWARTZ 1997, STERN 1990, VAN DALEN and HENKENS 2004] and its differences among natural and social sciences fields, no study has yet measured the changes in scientific articles' uncitedness rates over a long period of time and across fields. As suggested by PENDLEBURY [1991]: \"A trend toward more or less \"uncitedness,\" however, might be meaningful. For the 1980s, we see no such trend in the scientific literature: the numbers are essential flat …\" p. 1410. This paper analyses the changes in articles' uncitedness rates over a 26 year period (1981-2006) for all fields of the natural sciences and engineering (NSE), medicine (MED), social sciences (SS) and humanities (HUM). This paper provides evidence that the widely held belief that the majority of scientific papers are never cited is not empirically grounded. Contrasting with this belief, the data presented here suggest that the science system is increasingly being efficient as less and less literature is published without ever being unused. One can indeed observe that in all domains but HUM, the share of scientific papers that are uncited has been decreasing steadily since the beginning of the eighties. Four phenomena could explain this trend. First, the emergence of online bibliographic databases and of electronic means of diffusion and access provided more opportunities for researchers to find and access scientific articles. Second, as suggested by SEGLEN [1992], uncitedness rates might be caused by limited space allowed to references by journal editors. Hence, the steady increase in the number of references per paper [LARIVIÈRE, ARCHAMBAULT, GINGRAS, 2008] might decrease uncitedness rates. Third, the levelling off of the growth of the world's scientific production [LARIVIÈRE, ARCHAMBAULT, GINGRAS, 2008] increases the probability that articles are increasingly being cited. A fourth phenomenon that could explain this decrease is an improved accuracy of cited references in Thomson's bibliographic database, but we think that this technical aspect would explain only part of the decline in uncitedness. For the particular case of humanities, the relatively high level of uncitedness and its stability over time are probably related to the fact that these disciplines tend to cite books more than articles (LARIVIÈRE et al., 2006)","journal":"Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)","year":2008,"id":11465,"datarank":0.33518120299946486,"base_score":1.6094379124341003,"endowment":1.6094379124341003,"self_citation_contribution":0.24141568686511508,"citation_network_contribution":0.0937655161343498,"self_endowment_contribution":0.24141568686511508,"citer_contribution":0.0937655161343498,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":4,"citer_count":3,"citers_with_citation_signal":3,"citers_with_endowment":3,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.0461,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":1,"downloads":45,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2008-09-17","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":16559,"name":"Archambault, Éric","orcid":"0000-0002-4422-1054","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":2841,"name":"Gingras, Yves","orcid":"0000-0002-4729-1269","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":61806,"name":"Matthew L. Wallace","orcid":"0000-0001-5407-8653","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":228,"name":"Vincent Larivière","orcid":"0000-0002-2733-0689","position":0,"is_corresponding":false}],"reference_count":12,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-03-01T18:20:47.508186Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}