Search for evergreens in science: A functional data analysis

Evergreens in science are papers that display a continual rise in annual citations without decline, at least within a sufficiently long time period. Aiming to better understand evergreens in particular and patterns of citation trajectory in general, this paper develops a functional data analysis method to cluster citation trajectories of a sample of 1699 research papers published in 1980 in the American Physical Society (APS) journals. We...