https://doi.org/10.1007/s100510050359
How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution
Center for BioDynamics, Center for Polymer Studies, Boston
University, Boston, MA, 02215, USA
Received:
12
May
1998
Accepted:
12
May
1998
Published online: 15 July 1998
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 
. This, in turn, suggests that the
number of papers with x citations, N(x), has a large-x power law
decay 
, with 
.
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
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag, 1998
