Related papers: Are the discretised lognormal and hooked power law…
Identifying the statistical distribution that best fits citation data is important to allow robust and powerful quantitative analyses. Whilst previous studies have suggested that both the hooked power law and discretised lognormal…
Many different citation-based indicators are used by researchers and research evaluators to help evaluate the impact of scholarly outputs. Although the appropriateness of individual citation indicators depends in part on the statistical…
The citations to a set of academic articles are typically unevenly shared, with many articles attracting few citations and few attracting many. It is important to know more precisely how citations are distributed in order to help…
Although statistical models fit many citation data sets reasonably well with the best fitting models being the hooked power law and discretised lognormal distribution, the fits are rarely close. One possible reason is that there might be…
Modeling distributions of citations to scientific papers is crucial for understanding how science develops. However, there is a considerable empirical controversy on which statistical model fits the citation distributions best. This paper…
Power laws pervade statistical physics and complex systems, but, traditionally, researchers in these fields have paid little attention to properly fit these distributions. Who has not seen (or even shown) a log-log plot of a completely…
Citation distributions are crucial for the analysis and modeling of the activity of scientists. We investigated bibliometric data of papers published in journals of the American Physical Society, searching for the type of function which…
Power-law distributions occur in many situations of scientific interest and have significant consequences for our understanding of natural and man-made phenomena. Unfortunately, the detection and characterization of power laws is…
Citations are increasingly used for research evaluations. It is therefore important to identify factors affecting citation scores that are unrelated to scholarly quality or usefulness so that these can be taken into account. Regression is…
Citation distributions are lognormal. We use 30 lognormally distributed synthetic series of numbers that simulate real series of citations to investigate the consistency of the h index. Using the lognormal cumulative distribution function,…
Power-law distributions occur in wide variety of physical, biological, and social phenomena. In this paper, we propose a statistical hypothesis test based on the log-likelihood ratio to assess whether two samples of discrete data are drawn…
Power-law distributions contain precious information about a large variety of processes in geoscience and elsewhere. Although there are sound theoretical grounds for these distributions, the empirical evidence in favor of power laws has…
Statistical distributions with heavy tails are ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena. Since the entries in heavy tail have disproportional significance, the knowledge of its exact shape is very important. Citations of scientific papers…
Power-law probability distributions arise often in the social and natural sciences. Statistics have been developed for estimating the exponent parameter as well as gauging goodness-of-fit to a power law. Yet paradoxically, many famous power…
Academic papers have been the protagonists in disseminating expertise. Naturally, paper citation pattern analysis is an efficient and essential way of investigating the knowledge structure of science and technology. For decades, it has been…
This short communication uses a simple experiment to show that fitting to a power law distribution by using graphical methods based on linear fit on the log-log scale is biased and inaccurate. It shows that using maximum likelihood…
Bayesian modelling and statistical text analysis rely on informed probability priors to encourage good solutions. This paper empirically analyses whether text in medical discharge reports follow Zipf's law, a commonly assumed statistical…
Universality or near-universality of citation distributions was found empirically a decade ago but its theoretical justification has been lacking so far. Here, we systematically study citation distributions for different disciplines in…
Power laws are a characteristic distribution that are ubiquitous, in that they are found almost everywhere, in both natural as well as in man-made systems. They tend to emerge in large, connected and self-organizing systems, for example,…
Logarithmic transformation of the data has been recommended by the literature in the case of highly skewed distributions such as those commonly found in information science. The purpose of the transformation is to make the data conform to…