# Is there really a Citation Age Bias in NLP?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03545 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03545/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [COMET: A Neural Framework for MT Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09025/) (2020)
- [MoverScore: Text Generation Evaluating with Contextualized Embeddings and Earth Mover Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02622/) (2019)
- [Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01608/) (2019)
- [On the Use of ArXiv as a Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00075/) (2019)
- [AutomaTikZ: Text-Guided Synthesis of Scientific Vector Graphics with TikZ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00367/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT: A Meta-Analysis after 2.5 Months](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13795/) (2023)
- [We are Who We Cite: Bridges of Influence Between Natural Language Processing and Other Academic Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14870/) (2023)
- [Geographic Citation Gaps in NLP Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14424/) (2022)
- [Gender Gap in Natural Language Processing Research: Disparities in Authorship and Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00962/) (2020)
- [Forgotten Knowledge: Examining the Citational Amnesia in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18554/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Landscape of Natural Language Processing Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10652/) (2023)
- [Transformers Go for the LOLs: Generating (Humourous) Titles from Scientific Abstracts End-to-End](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10522/) (2022)
- [Predicting Research Trends From Arxiv](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02831/) (2019)
- [On the Shoulders of Giants: The Growing Impact of Older Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.0275/) (2014)
- [Attention decay in science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01881/) (2015)
- [Did AI get more negative recently?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13610/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SciEvo: A 2 Million, 30-Year Cross-disciplinary Dataset for Temporal Scientometric Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09510/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Citations are a key ingredient of scientific research to relate a paper to others published in the community. Recently, it has been noted that there is a citation age bias in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community, one of the currently fastest growing AI subfields, in that the mean age of the bibliography of NLP papers has become ever younger in the last few years, leading to `citation amnesia' in which older knowledge is increasingly forgotten. In this work, we put such claims into perspective by analyzing the bibliography of ~300k papers across 15 different scientific fields submitted to the popular preprint server Arxiv in the time period from 2013 to 2022. We find that all AI subfields (in particular: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.LG) have similar trends of citation amnesia, in which the age of the bibliography has roughly halved in the last 10 years (from above 12 in 2013 to below 7 in 2022), on average. Rather than diagnosing this as a citation age bias in the NLP community, we believe this pattern is an artefact of the dynamics of these research fields, in which new knowledge is produced in ever shorter time intervals.