How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution

被引:1017
作者
Redner, S [1 ]
机构
[1] Boston Univ, Ctr Polymer Studies, Ctr Biodynam, Boston, MA 02215 USA
基金
美国国家科学基金会;
关键词
01.75.+m Science and society; 02.50.-r Probability theory; stochastic processes; and statistics; 89.90.+n Other areas of general interest to physicists;
D O I
10.1007/s100510050359
中图分类号
O469 [凝聚态物理学];
学科分类号
070205 ;
摘要
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) similar to x(-alpha); with alpha approximate to 3.
引用
收藏
页码:131 / 134
页数:4
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