Long time series of highly cited articles: an empirical study

The study of how citations, received by scientific works, evolve with time is a relevant bibliometric topic. The present work aims at describing the evolution of received citations of highly cited scientific articles over a long time span (30 years or more). It tries to answer to the question on how such citation trends evolve, and on how much it is possible to assimilate them to a single model, by performing an empirical descriptive study. Thirty articles (the five most cited for each of the six Subject categories in two Research domains) are taken into account. Once obtained the citation received by the articles, their trends are traced and analysed. The empirical results show that received citations exhibit significantly different trends. Moreover, many articles are not affected by the phenomenon of aging. Such facts make it more difficult to generalize citation trends.