Universality of citation distributions for academic institutions and journals
Abstract
Citations measure the importance of a publication, and may serve as a proxy for its popularity and quality of its contents. Here we study the distributions of citations to publications from individual academic institutions for a single year. The average number of citations have large variations between different institutions across the world, but the probability distributions of citations for individual institutions can be rescaled to a common form by scaling the citations by the average number of citations for that institution. We find this feature seem to be universal for a broad selection of institutions irrespective of the average number of citations per article. A similar analysis for citations to publications in a particular journal in a single year reveals similar results. We find high absolute inequality for both these sets, Gini coefficients being around and for institutions and journals respectively. We also find that the top % of the articles hold about % of the total citations for institutions and the top % of the articles hold about % of the total citations for journals.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1409.8029,
title = {Universality of citation distributions for academic institutions and journals},
author = {Arnab Chatterjee and Asim Ghosh and Bikas K Chakrabarti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.8029},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
9 pages, 6 figs + Supplementary information (8 pages, 7 fig, 6 tables). Accepted in PLoS ONE