How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution (original) (raw)
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 \(N(x) \sim {x^{ - a}}\), with \(a \approx 3\).
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Authors and Affiliations
- Center for BioDynamics, Center for Polymer Studies, Boston University, 02215, Boston, MA, USA
S. Redner
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Received: 12 May 1998 / Accepted: 12 May 1998
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Redner, S. How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution.Eur. Phys. J. B 4, 131–134 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/s100510050359
- Issue date: July 1998
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s100510050359