In the context of building first-class universities and disciplines, objective and scientific disciplinary evaluation methods are crucial for guiding discipline development. However, current mainstream academic evaluations are English-oriented, while Chinese academic evaluations still focus on journals, which fail to reflect the basic status of discipline progress. Therefore, research on the contribution of Chinese academic papers to disciplines deserves particular attention. To determine the appropriate time range for literature publication in disciplinary evaluation, this article, based on the phenomenon of literature aging and the current state of empirical research and measurement indicators, uses a sample of 6,608 Chinese academic journals. It collects and organizes 38.99 million Chinese academic papers published between 2003 and 2023, as well as 35.07 million citations of these papers, forming a large dataset. Combining theories of bibliometrics and data analysis, the article proposes the concept of the "active period" of a discipline and calculates the active period for all first-level disciplines listed by the State Council's Academic Degrees Committee. Empirical results show that the concept and calculation method of the discipline's active period are scientific and reasonable, aligning closely with the expected pattern of discipline activity, and confirming the initial scientific hypothesis. This study not only calculates the active periods for various disciplines using large sample data for the first time, but also provides important theoretical and empirical evidence for research in areas such as talent evaluation, trend analysis, and disciplinary performance assessment, allowing for the selection of appropriate time frames based on the active periods of different disciplines.