Quantifying the changing role of past publications

Our current societies increasingly rely on electronic repositories of collective knowledge. An archetype of these databases is the Web of Science (WoS) that stores scientific publications. In contrast to several other forms of knowledge—e.g., Wikipedia articles—a scientific paper does not change after its “birth”. Nonetheless, from the moment a paper is published it exists within the evolving web of other papers, thus, its actual meaning to the...