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The European Physical Journal B
ISSN: 1434-6028 (printed version)
ISSN: 1434-6036 (electronic version)
Abstract Volume 4 Issue 2 (1998) pp 131-134
rapid note: How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution
S. Redner (a)
Center for BioDynamics, Center for Polymer Studies, Boston University, Boston, MA, 02215, USA
Received: 12 May 1998 / Accepted: 12 May 1998
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 $N(x)\sim x^{-\alpha}$, with $\alpha\approx 3$.
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
(a) redner@sid.bu.edu
Article in PDF-Format (336 KB)
Online publication: August 10, 1998
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