How Popular is Your Paper? An Empirical Study of the Citation Distribution
S. Redner
Abstract
Numerical data for the distribution of citations are examined for: (i) papers published in 1981 in journals which are catalogued by the Institute for Scientific Information (783,339 papers) and (ii) 20 years of publications in Physical Review D, vols. 11-50 (24,296 papers). A Zipf plot of the number of citations to a given paper versus its citation rank appears to be consistent with a power-law dependence for leading rank papers, with exponent close to -1/2. This, in turn, suggests that the number of papers with x citations, N(x), has a large-x power law decay N(x)~x-alpha, with alpha approximately equal to 3.
Create a lesson
Related papers
Global Minima of the Thomson Problem in a Disk: A Molecular Dynamics Approach with Fixed Border Charges
Georgiy K. Lavrov, Eduard G. Nikonov
Martingale theory for heat and phase-space contraction in heterogeneous diffusions
Jing Qin, Nariya Uchida, Édgar Roldán
Formal Fluctuation-Response Relations for Non-Stationary Systems: The Dynamic Conjugate Variable
Igor M. Sokolov
Khinchin's ergodicity and typicality in statistical mechanics
Dario Lucente, Marco Baldovin, Giacomo Gradenigo et al.
Universal 1/f Noise in the Power Spectra of Energy Time-series in Solvated DNA Dynamics
Harsh Sahu, Deepika Sardana, Pramod Kumar et al.
Landau diamagnetism and the de Haas-van Alphen effect from a single geometric construction
Sung-Hoon Lee