The purpose of this study was to assess the gamma distribution as a model of the distribution of ages of cited references in corpora of scientific literature, and to derive inferences from the parameters of the distributions. The ages of cited references in 2867 articles published in 40 distinguished journals in the fields of accounting, economics, finance, management, marketing, operations and information systems, organisation behaviour and human resources were analysed. The distributions of ages of cited references in each subject area were fitted to gamma distributions with the parameters estimated using minimum distance estimation. In contrast to extant literature, it is shown for all subject areas in the study that the goodness-of-fit statistics for gamma distributions were superior to those for lognormal distributions. The rate of growth of knowledge and the temporal profile of the growth of knowledge are derived from the parameters of the gamma distributions and differentiate the subject areas. Longitudinal analysis demonstrates that the gamma distribution models are stable but illustrate the evolution of specific corpora of literature over time. The gamma distribution parameters and derived metrics can be applied diagnostically and descriptively to characterise corpora of literature, or prospectively to set norms, expectations and criteria for new research. The results have implications for future bibliometric studies, authors, editors, reviewers, and knowledge researchers. Opportunities for further research and verification of prior research are created from this novel bibliometric approach.

中文翻译：

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引用参考文献的时代和科学知识的增长：商业和管理学科中伽玛分布的解释

本研究的目的是评估 gamma 分布作为科学文献语料库中引用参考文献年龄分布的模型，并从分布参数中得出推论。分析了会计、经济、金融、管理、市场营销、运营和信息系统、组织行为和人力资源等领域的 40 种著名期刊发表的 2867 篇文章中引用参考文献的年龄。每个学科领域中引用参考文献的年龄分布都被拟合到伽玛分布，参数使用最小距离估计进行估计。与现有文献相比，研究中的所有学科领域都表明，伽马分布的拟合优度统计优于对数正态分布的拟合优度统计。知识增长速度和知识增长的时间分布是从伽马分布的参数中得出的，并区分主题领域。纵向分析表明伽马分布模型是稳定的，但说明了特定文献语料库随时间的演变。伽马分布参数和派生指标可以诊断性和描述性地应用于表征文献语料库，或前瞻性地为新研究设定规范、期望和标准。结果对未来的文献计量研究、作者、编辑、审稿人和知识研究人员都有影响。这种新颖的文献计量方法为进一步研究和验证先前研究创造了机会。