ON SOME STOPPING-TIMES OF CITATION PROCESSES - FROM THEORY TO INDICATORS

A new measure of the citation speed of scientific publications based on a stopping time approach is proposed. A short theoretical introduction shows the mathematical exactness of the applied methods. The citation rate for papers published in 1980 has been recorded in the period 1980 through 1989 in three science fields. A sequence of the ith Harmonic Mean Response Times (i.e., the harmonic means of the time elapsed between the publication date and the date of the ith (i = 1,2,...) citation of the papers) is analysed. The sequences can be approximated by linear functions. This empirical rule leads to the assumption that the complete citation succession and the rapidness of the ith response are already determined by the mean of the first response.