Citation Statistics From More Than a Century of Physical Review
arXiv:physics/0407137
Abstract
We study the statistics of citations from all Physical Review journals for the 110-year period 1893 until 2003. In addition to characterizing the citation distribution and identifying publications with the highest citation impact, we investigate how citations evolve with time. There is a positive correlation between the number of citations to a paper and the average age of citations. Citations from a publication have an exponentially decaying age distribution; that is, old papers tend to not get cited. In contrast, the citations to a publication are consistent with a power-law age distribution, with an exponent close to -1 over a time range of 2 -- 20 years. We also identify a number of strongly-correlated citation bursts and other dramatic features in the time history of citations to individual publications.
arXiv comment17 pages, 11 figures, 2-column revtex format. Revised manuscript completely rewritten in response to referee comments for PRE. Now 12 pages long in revtex4 2-column format
Cited by in corpus (17)
- Fano resonances in nanoscale structures
- Finding local community structure in networks
- Finding Scientific Gems with Google
- Graph Evolution: Densification and Shrinking Diameters
- Scale Invariance in Road Networks
- Experience versus Talent Shapes the Structure of the Web
- Bifurcation of Stretched Exponential Relaxation in Microscopically Homogeneous Glasses
- Degree difference: A simple measure to characterize structural heterogeneity in complex networks
- Construction of bipartite and unipartite weighted networks from collections of journal papers
- Theory of citing
- Live and Dead Nodes
- The Demise of Single-Authored Publications in Computer Science: A Citation Network Analysis
- Raising Graphs From Randomness to Reveal Information Networks
- Structure dynamics of evolving scientific networks
- Towards an explanatory and computational theory of scientific discovery
- Spaceland Embedding of Sparse Stochastic Graphs
- Modeling a Century of Citation Distributions