PUBLICATION DELAYS IN THE SCIENCE FIELD AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO THEAGING OF SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE

This article presents an exploratory analysis of publication delays in the science field. Publication delay is defined as the time period be tween submission and publication of an article for a scientific journa l. We obtained a first indication that these delays are longer with re gard to journals in the fields of mathematics and technical sciences t han they are in other fields of science. We suggest the use of data on publication delays in the analysis of the effects of electronic publi shing on reference/citation patterns. A preliminary analysis on a smal l sample suggests that - under rather strict assumptions - the cited h alf-life of references may be reduced with a factor of about 2 if publ ication delays decrease radically.