Boring title: "Scientific authors follow more citations when reading modern papers". When I read a modern paper, I skim a lot more of the references. Getting t

Boring title: "Scientific authors follow more citations when reading modern papers". When I read a modern paper, I skim a lot more of the references. Getting to a cited paper is often just two clicks: there's a reference to the bibliography, and from there a link to arXiv (or some other public repository). As papers get older the bibliography might not link to arXiv, or might not link to a digitized paper at all. Those older papers are more time consuming to use as a reference. Scientists aren't lazy but they also don't have infinite time. Put another way: papers form a graph, this result suggests that older nodes are traversed less frequently. I think the metric they propose is useful, but we could rephrase this all as measure of how useful papers are as a node (where CD = -1 is most useful, CD = 1 is least useful). In short, this result might just mean paper discovery is getting easier. That's a good thing. We can wring our hands endlessly about how there's less low hanging fruit (there is) or about how academia is rotting away (as though it was ever different), but those conclusions are big jumps from what this paper says.