Copied citations create renowned papers?
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
2007-05-23 v1 Physics and Society
Abstract
Recently we discovered (cond-mat/0212043) that the majority of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers. Here we show that a model, in which a scientist picks three random papers, cites them,and also copies a quarter of their references accounts quantitatively for empirically observed citation distribution. Simple mathematical probability, not genius, can explain why some papers are cited a lot more than the other.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0305150,
title = {Copied citations create renowned papers?},
author = {M. V. Simkin and V. P. Roychowdhury},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0305150},
year = {2007}
}