  When PageRank began to be used for ranking in Web search, a concern soon
arose that older pages have an inherent --- and potentially unfair ---
advantage over emerging pages of high quality, because they have had more time
to acquire hyperlink citations. Algorithms were then proposed to compensate for
this effect. Curiously, in bibliometry, the opposite concern has often been
raised: that a growing body of recent papers crowds out older papers, resulting
in a collective amnesia in research communities, which potentially leads to
reinventions, redundancies, and missed opportunities to connect ideas. A recent
paper by Verstak et al. reported experiments on Google Scholar data, which
seemed to refute the amnesia, or aging, hypothesis. They claimed that more
recently written papers have a larger fraction of outbound citations targeting
papers that are older by a fixed number of years, indicating that ancient
papers are alive and well-loved and increasingly easily found, thanks in part
to Google Scholar. In this paper we show that the full picture is considerably
more nuanced. Specifically, the fate of a fixed sample of papers, as they age,
is rather different from what Verstak et al.'s study suggests: there is clear
and steady abandonment in favor of citations to newer papers. The two
apparently contradictory views are reconciled by the realization that, as time
passes, the number of papers older than a fixed number of years grows rapidly.
