Comparative study on the obsolescence of humanities and social sciences in China: under the new situation of web

With the study on 2,217,047 references of 280,280 source articles in Chinese Social Science Citation Index in year 2006–2008, we discovered the overall aging phenomenon of humanities and social sciences by means of synchronous citation analysis, and compared the aging law of seven disciplines. The results reveal that the aging speed of seven disciplines roughly descend as follows: Management, Economics, Education, Law, Literature, Philosophy, History. This is due to the reasons that the aging speed of humanities is slower than social sciences and the dependence of History and Philosophy on archival literature is the strongest. Moreover, each discipline of humanities and social sciences follows a basic function: half life (H) × Price Index (P) = constant C, C is 2.6 or so. Furthermore, the maximum citation age of humanities and social sciences at this stage is found to be about 3 years.

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