https://doi.org/10.1007/s100510050097
Are citations of scientific papers a case of nonextensivity?
Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas, Rua Xavier Sigaud 150,
22290-180 Rio de Janeiro-RJ, Brazil
Received:
13
April
1999
Published online: 15 February 2000
The distribution N(x) of citations of scientific papers
has recently been illustrated (on ISI and PRE data sets) and analyzed by
Redner (Eur. Phys. J. B 4, 131 (1998)). To fit the data, a stretched
exponential (
) has been used with only
partial success. The success is not complete because the data exhibit, for
large citation count x, a power law (roughly 
for the
ISI data), which, clearly, the stretched exponential does not reproduce.
This fact is then attributed to a possibly different nature of rarely cited
and largely cited papers. We show here that, within a nonextensive
thermostatistical formalism, the same data can be quite satisfactorily
fitted with a single curve (namely,
![$N(x) \propto 1/[1+(q-1) \lambda x]^{\tfrac{q}{q-1}}$](/articles/epjb/abs/2000/04/b9357/b9357_tex_eq3.png)
for the available values of x. This is
consistent with the connection recently established by Denisov
(Phys. Lett.
A 235, 447 (1997)) between this nonextensive formalism and the
Zipf-Mandelbrot law. What the present analysis
ultimately suggests is that, in contrast to Redner's conclusion, the
phenomenon might essentially be
one and the same along the
entire range of the citation number
x.
PACS: 02.50.-r – Probability theory, stochastic processes, and statistics / 01.75.+m – Science and society / 89.90.+n – Other topics of general interest to physicists (restricted to new topics in section 89)
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag, 2000
