[OC] I analyzed 750,000 academic citations to find out what “recent” actually means in different fields

When researchers write "recent studies show…" – how recent is recent, really?

I scraped 749,853 references from 19,108 papers across 200 academic fields using OpenAlex data to find out.

TL;DR:

• Average "recent" = about 5 years
• Virology/Pandemic research: 2 years (half their citations are from the last 2 years!)
• Philosophy/History: 7-10 years
• Humanities fields: 50%+ of their "recent" citations are 10+ years old

The most interesting findings:

1. Virology is FAST – 52.8% of citations are ≤2 years old. Makes sense given COVID.
2. Philology lives in the past – 51.6% of citations are ≥10 years old. When you're studying ancient texts, "recent" is relative.
3. Same-year citations – 4.3% of all references are from papers published the same year. Preprints are changing the game.
4. Maximum lag found: 50 years in a Natural Language Processing paper. Someone cited a 1970s paper as "recent" lol.

Methodology:

• Searched for papers with "recent" in abstract (2020-2024)
• Extracted all their references
• Calculated citation lag = citing_year – cited_year
• Used OpenAlex API (free and open!)

Inspired by the BMJ paper "How recent is recent?" which did this for medical fields only.

Full code and data: https://github.com/JoonSimJoon/How-current-is-recent

Tools: Python, OpenAlex API, geopandas for maps