Publication: References made and citations received by scientific articles
Loading...
Identifiers
Publication date
2011-01
Defense date
Authors
Advisors
Tutors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Wiley Online Library
Abstract
This article studies massive evidence about references
made and citations received after a 5-year citation window
by 3.7 million articles published in 1998 to 2002 in
22 scientific fields. We find that the distributions of references
made and citations received share a number of
basic features across sciences. Reference distributions
are rather skewed to the right while citation distributions
are even more highly skewed:The mean is about 20
percentage points to the right of the median, and articles
with a remarkable or an outstanding number of citations
represent about 9% of the total. Moreover, the existence
of a power law representing the upper tail of citation distributions
cannot be rejected in 17 fields whose articles
represent 74.7% of the total. Contrary to the evidence in
other contexts, the value of the scale parameter is above
3.5 in 13 of the 17 cases. Finally, power laws are typically
small, but capture a considerable proportion of the total
citations received
Description
Keywords
Bibliographic citation
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2011, v. 62, n. 1, pp. 40-49