  A study released by the Google Scholar team found an apparently increasing
fraction of citations to old articles from studies published in the last 24
years (1990-2013). To demonstrate this finding we conducted a complementary
study using a different data source (Journal Citation Reports), metric
(aggregate cited half-life), time spam (2003-2013), and set of categories (53
Social Science subject categories and 167 Science subject categories). Although
the results obtained confirm and reinforce the previous findings, the possible
causes of this phenomenon keep unclear. We finally hypothesize that first page
results syndrome in conjunction with the fact that Google Scholar favours the
most cited documents are suggesting the growing trend of citing old documents
is partly caused by Google Scholar.
