English

Citations and the Zipf-Mandelbrot's law

Physics and Society 2007-05-23 v2 Statistical Mechanics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Abstract

A curious observation was made that the rank statistics of scientific citation numbers follows Zipf-Mandelbrot's law. The same pow-like behavior is exhibited by some simple random citation models. The observed regularity indicates not so much the peculiar character of the underlying (complex) process, but more likely, than it is usually assumed, its more stochastic nature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.physics/9901035,
  title  = {Citations and the Zipf-Mandelbrot's law},
  author = {Z. K. Silagadze},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/9901035},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

20 pages, 10 figures, important reference and note were added

R2 v1 2026-07-22T19:18:38.724Z