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Power-law citation distributions are not scale-free.
- Source :
-
Physical Review E . Sep2017, Vol. 96 Issue 3, p1-1. 1p. - Publication Year :
- 2017
-
Abstract
- We analyze time evolution of statistical distributions of citations to scientific papers published in the same year. While these distributions seem to follow the power-law dependence we find that they are nonstationary and the exponent of the power-law fit decreases with time and does not come to saturation. We attribute the nonstationarity of citation distributions to different longevity of the low-cited and highly cited papers. By measuring citation trajectories of papers we found that citation careers of the low-cited papers come to saturation after 10-15 years while those of the highly cited papers continue to increase indefinitely: The papers that exceed some citation threshold become runaways. Thus, we show that although citation distribution can look as a power-law dependence, it is not scale free and there is a hidden dynamic scale associated with the onset of runaways. We compare our measurements to our recently developed model of citation dynamics based on copying-redirection-triadic closure and find explanations to our empirical observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- *DYNAMICS
*RESEARCH papers (Students)
*LONGEVITY
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 24700045
- Volume :
- 96
- Issue :
- 3
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Physical Review E
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 125618339
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.96.032306