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on Sociology of Economics |
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Issue of 2014‒03‒08
one paper chosen by Jonas Holmström Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration |
| By: | Michał Brzeziński (Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw) |
| Abstract: | 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 is concerned with rigorous empirical detection of power-law behaviour in the distribution of citations received by the most highly cited scientific papers. We have used a large, novel data set on citations to scientific papers published between 1998 and 2002 drawn from Scopus. The power-law model is compared with a number of alternative models using a likelihood ratio test. We have found that the power-law hypothesis is rejected for around half of the Scopus fields of science. For these fields of science, the Yule, power-law with exponential cut-off and log-normal distributions seem to fit the data better than the pure power-law model. On the other hand, when the power-law hypothesis is not rejected, it is usually empirically indistinguishable from most of the alternative models. |
| Keywords: | power law, Pareto model, citation distribution, bibliometrics, scientometrics, Scopus, model selection |
| JEL: | A12 C46 C52 |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:war:wpaper:2014-05&r=sog |