Publication: The skewness of science in 219 sub-fields and a number of aggregates
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2011-05
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Tutors
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Springer
Abstract
This paper studies evidence from Thomson Scientific (TS) about the citation
process of 3.7 million articles published in the period 1998 2002 in 219 Web of Science
(WoS) categories, or sub fields. Reference and citation distributions have very different
characteristics across sub fields. However, when analyzed with the Characteristic Scores
and Scales (CSS) technique, which is replication and scale invariant, the shape of these
distributions over three broad categories of articles appears strikingly similar. Reference
distributions are mildly skewed, but citation distributions with a 5 year citation window are
highly skewed: the mean is 20 points above the median, while 9 10% of all articles in the
upper tail account for about 44% of all citations. The aggregation of sub fields into dis
ciplines and fields according to several aggregation schemes preserve this feature of
citation distributions. It should be noted that when we look into subsets of articles within
the lower and upper tails of citation distributions the universality partially breaks down. On
the other hand, for 140 of the 219 sub fields the existence of a power law cannot be
rejected. However, contrary to what is generally believed, at the sub field level the scaling
parameter is above 3.5 most of the time, and power laws are relatively small: on average,
they represent 2% of all articles and account for 13.5% of all citations. The results of the
aggregation into disciplines and fields reveal that power law algebra is a subtle
phenomenon
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Keywords
Research performance, Citation analysis, Power laws, Characteristic Scores
Bibliographic citation
Scientometrics, 2011, v. 88, n. 2, pp. 385-397