Why are Authors Citing Older Papers?

Late last year, computer scientists at Google Scholar published a report describing how authors were citing older papers. The researchers posed several explanations for the trend that focused on the digitization of publishing and the marvelous improvements to search and relevance ranking.

However, as I wrote in my critique of their paper, the trend to cite older papers began decades before Google Scholar, Google, or even the Internet was invented. When you are in the search business, everything good in this world must be the result of search.
Source: The Scholarly Kitchen
URL: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/04/29/why-are-authors-citing-older-papers/