RT Journal Article
T1 The skewness of science in 219 sub-fields and a number of aggregates
A1 Albarrán, Pedro
A1 Crespo, Juan A.
A1 Ortuño, Ignacio
A1 Ruiz-Castillo, Javier
AB This paper studies evidence from Thomson Scientific (TS) about the citationprocess 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 differentcharacteristics across sub fields. However, when analyzed with the Characteristic Scoresand Scales (CSS) technique, which is replication and scale invariant, the shape of thesedistributions over three broad categories of articles appears strikingly similar. Referencedistributions are mildly skewed, but citation distributions with a 5 year citation window arehighly skewed: the mean is 20 points above the median, while 9 10% of all articles in theupper tail account for about 44% of all citations. The aggregation of sub fields into disciplines and fields according to several aggregation schemes preserve this feature ofcitation distributions. It should be noted that when we look into subsets of articles withinthe lower and upper tails of citation distributions the universality partially breaks down. Onthe other hand, for 140 of the 219 sub fields the existence of a power law cannot berejected. However, contrary to what is generally believed, at the sub field level the scalingparameter 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 theaggregation into disciplines and fields reveal that power law algebra is a subtlephenomenon
PB Springer
SN 0138-9130
YR 2011
FD 2011-05
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/14543
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/14543
LA eng
NO The authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish MEC through grantsSEJ2007 63098, SEJ2007 67436, ECO2009 11165, and ECO2010 19596
DS e-Archivo
RD 4 may. 2024