How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution |
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| Authors: | S Redner |
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| Institution: | (1) Center for BioDynamics, Center for Polymer Studies, Boston University, Boston, MA, 02215, USA, US |
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| 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 , with .
Received: 12 May 1998 / Accepted: 12 May 1998 |
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| Keywords: | PACS 02 50 -r Probability theory stochastic processes and statistics - 01 75 +m Science and society - 89 90 +n Other areas of general interest to physicists |
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