Proof of a conjecture of Moed and Garfield on authoritative references and extension to non-authoritative references

Summary

In a recent paper [H. F. MOED, E. GARFIELD: In basic science the percentage of “authoritative”references decreases as bibliographies become shorter. Scientometrics 60 (3) (2004) 295-303] the authors show, experimentally, the validity of the statement in the title of their paper. In this paper we give a general informetric proof of it, under certain natural conditions. The proof is given both in the discrete and the continuous setting. An easy corollary of this result is that the fraction of non-authoritative references increases as bibliographies become shorter. This finding is supported by a set of data of the journal Information Processing and Management (2002 + 2003) with respect to the fraction of conference proceedings articles in reference lists.