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International Conference on Libraries for Sustainable Futures: Collaboration, Technology and Knowledge Sharing (Hybrid) at Thiruvananthapuram
February 10, 2026 at 6pm to February 28, 2026 at 7pm
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IISER Thiruvananthapuram invites online application from eligible candidates for the Library Superintendent (UR-1) Group: B non-teaching position on regular basis.
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February 21, 2026 from 9:30am to 3:30pmOne-Day Seminar on Research Journal Article Writing and Publishing
February 16, 2026 from 10am to 4pm
User Awareness Programme on ORCID, IRINS and INFLIBNET Services for Scholarly Communities at Avantika University, Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh on March 20, 2026.
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February 7, 2026 from 8:30am to 5:30pm
Online applications are invited from eligible candidates for appointment to the Semi-Professional Assistant, Library Attendant Group B & C posts in the Manipur University, Canchipur, Manipur.
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Half Life of Literature in LIS
Replies to This Forum
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Permalink Reply by Ajay Sharma on
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Hello dear,
Happy new year.I am giving some information about Half Life of Literature. I hope it will be helpful for you.
Half-Life of Scientific Literature
The term "half-life" comes from Burton, R. E., and R. W. Kebler. 1960. The "half-life" of some scientific and technical literatures. American documentation 11: 18-22. It makes an analogy to the radioactive decay of nuclear particles and assumes an exponential curve.
Use of the Library material can be measured a number of different ways (e.g., requests for the document via interlibrary loan or document delivery, citations to the publication, or number of times a book is circulated). Such studies help librarians decide which documents to keep or discard.
The rate and pattern at which usage drops of has been shown to vary by discipline. Generally speaking, documents in the physical sciences receive most of their use early in their "lives" and then drop off rather steeply, whereas documents in the humanities tend to be used on a more consistent basis and have a less steep drop off curve.
To compare the speed of decay in different subjects, "half-life" is used as a measure. Half-life refers to the time during which one half of the current active literature was published.
ISI's Journal Citation Reports (1997) defines "cited half-life" as "the number of journal publication years going back from the current year which account for 50% of the total citations received by the cited journal in the current year."Ajay Sharma
Librarian,
UPTEC, Lucknow
E-mail:akss.ajay@gmail.com
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