How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution

European Physical Journal B

Volumn 4, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 131-134

  Redner, S ^a  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

01.75.+m Science and society; 02.50. r Probability theory, stochastic processes, and statistics; 89.90.+n Other areas of general interest to physicists

Indexed keywords

PROBABILITY; RANDOM PROCESSES; STATISTICAL METHODS;

CITATION DISTRIBUTION; ZIPF PLOT;

TECHNICAL WRITING;

EID: 0031622508     PISSN: 14346028     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s100510050359     Document Type: Article

References (7)

1. See e.g., Science Citation Index Journal Citation Reports (Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia) for annual lists of top-cited journals and articles (web site: http://www.isinet.com/welcome.html).
2. For example, current lists of top-cited articles in high-energy physics are maintained by the SPIRES High-Energy Physics Database at SLAC (web site http://www.slac.stanford.edu/find/top40.html).
3. W. Shockley, Proc. IRE 45, 279-290 (1957).
4. J. Laherrere, D. Sornette, Eur. Phys. J. B 2, 525-539 (1998).
5. The PRD data was provided by H. Galic from the SPIRES Database. The ISI data was provided by D. Pendlebury and H. Small of the Institute for Scientific Information. These two data sets and related citation data are available from my web site http://physics.bu.edu/~redner.
6. G.K. Zipf, Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort (Addison-Wesley, Cambridge, 1949).
7. This is a basic exercise in extreme value statistics. See e.g., J. Galambos, The Asymptotic Theory of Extreme Order Statistics (J. Wiley & Sons, New York, 1978).