TY - JOUR
T1 - Statistical validation of a global model for the distribution of the ultimate number of citations accrued by papers published in a scientific journal
AU - Stringer, Michael J.
AU - Sales-Pardo, Marta
AU - Nunes Amaral, Luís A.
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2010 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2010/7
Y1 - 2010/7
N2 - A central issue in evaluative bibliometrics is the characterization of the citation distribution of papers in the scientific literature. Here, we perform a large-scale empirical analysis of journals from every field in Thomson Reuters' Web of Science database. We find that only 30 of the 2, 184 journals have citation distributions that are inconsistent with a discrete lognormal distribution at the rejection threshold that controls the false discovery rate at 0.05. We find that large, multidisciplinary journals are over-represented in this set of 30 journals, leading us to conclude that, within a discipline, citation distributions are lognormal. Our results strongly suggest that the discrete lognormal distribution is a globally accurate model for the distribution of "eventual impact" of scientific papers published in single-discipline journal in a single year that is removed sufficiently from the present date.
AB - A central issue in evaluative bibliometrics is the characterization of the citation distribution of papers in the scientific literature. Here, we perform a large-scale empirical analysis of journals from every field in Thomson Reuters' Web of Science database. We find that only 30 of the 2, 184 journals have citation distributions that are inconsistent with a discrete lognormal distribution at the rejection threshold that controls the false discovery rate at 0.05. We find that large, multidisciplinary journals are over-represented in this set of 30 journals, leading us to conclude that, within a discipline, citation distributions are lognormal. Our results strongly suggest that the discrete lognormal distribution is a globally accurate model for the distribution of "eventual impact" of scientific papers published in single-discipline journal in a single year that is removed sufficiently from the present date.
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U2 - 10.1002/asi.21335
DO - 10.1002/asi.21335
M3 - Article
C2 - 21858251
AN - SCOPUS:77954045879
VL - 61
SP - 1377
EP - 1385
JO - Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
JF - Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
SN - 2330-1635
IS - 7
ER -