Related papers: Copied citations create renowned papers?
We present empirical data on misprints in citations to twelve high-profile papers. The great majority of misprints are identical to misprints in articles that earlier cited the same paper. The distribution of the numbers of misprint…
Statistical analysis of repeat misprints in scientific citations leads to the conclusion that about 80% of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in othe papers. Based on this finding a mathematical theory of…
Recently we proposed a model in which when a scientist writes a manuscript, he picks up several random papers, cites them and also copies a fraction of their references (cond-mat/0305150). The model was stimulated by our discovery that a…
We present empirical data on frequency and pattern of misprints in citations to twelve high-profile papers. We find that the distribution of misprints, ranked by frequency of their repetition, follows Zipf's law. We propose a stochastic…
Recent research has found that select scientists have a disproportional share of highly cited papers. Researchers reasoned that this could not have happened if success in science was random and introduced a hidden parameter Q, or talent, to…
In an article written five years ago [arXiv:0809.0522], we described a method for predicting which scientific papers will be highly cited in the future, even if they are currently not highly cited. Applying the method to real citation data…
We propose a new citation model which builds on the existing models that explicitly or implicitly include "direct" and "indirect" (learning about a cited paper's existence from references in another paper) citation mechanisms. Our model…
The number of citations is a widely used metric to evaluate the scientific credit of papers, scientists and journals. However, it does happen that a paper with fewer citations from prestigious scientists is of higher influence than papers…
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…
Citations are commonly held to represent scientific impact. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence in support of this postulate that is central to research assessment exercises and Science of Science studies. Here, we report on…
The distribution of the number of academic publications as a function of citation count for a given year is remarkably similar from year to year. We measure this similarity as a width of the distribution and find it to be approximately…
Researchers cite works for a variety of reasons, including some having nothing to do with acknowledging influence. The distribution of different citation types in the literature, and which papers attract which types, is poorly understood.…
We develop a model for the distribution of scientific citations. The model involves a dual mechanism: in the direct mechanism, the author of a new paper finds an old paper A and cites it. In the indirect mechanism, the author of a new paper…
Mathematical models of the scientific citation process predict a strong "first-mover" effect under which the first papers in a field will, essentially regardless of content, receive citations at a rate enormously higher than papers…
References, the mechanism scientists rely on to signal previous knowledge, lately have turned into widely used and misused measures of scientific impact. Yet, when a discovery becomes common knowledge, citations suffer from obliteration by…
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…
Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes that spread across human culture by means of imitation. What makes a meme and what distinguishes it from other forms of information, however, is still poorly understood. Our analysis of memes in…
As science advances, the academic community has published millions of research papers. Researchers devote time and effort to search relevant manuscripts when writing a paper or simply to keep up with current research. In this paper, we…
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…
Is more always better? We address this question in the context of bibliometric indices that aim to assess the scientific impact of individual researchers by counting their number of highly cited publications. We propose a simple model in…