Editor:
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía
Issued date:
2009-12
ISSN:
2340-5031
Sponsor:
European Community's Seventh Framework Program The authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish MEC, Grants SEJ2007-67436,
SEJ2007-63098 and SEJ2006-05710. The database of Thomson Scientific (formerly Thomson-ISI;
Institute for Scientific Information) has been acquired with funds from Santander Universities
Global Division of Banco Santander. This paper is part of the SCIFI-GLOW Collaborative Project
supported by the European Commission’s Seventh Research Framework Programme, Contract no.
SSH7-CT-2008-217436.
Rights:
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España
Abstract:
This paper studies massive evidence about references made and citations received after a five-year
citation window by 3.7 million articles published in 1998-2002 in 22 scientific fields. We find that
the distributions of references made and citations receiveThis paper studies massive evidence about references made and citations received after a five-year
citation window by 3.7 million articles published in 1998-2002 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 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[+][-]