POWER LAW RELATIONS IN SCIENCE BIBLIOGRAPHY—A SELF‐CONSISTENT INTERPRETATION
Abstract
Abstract Several power law relations are found to occur in bibliographic studies of scientific journals, articles, and citations. These can be interpreted in a self‐consistent manner in terms of growth parameters of articles, journals, and citations. Similar models have been proposed earlier in physical, biological, and behavioural sciences.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Empirical studies have shown that distributions of article citations are very skewed, even within single disciplines.
“The use of relative indicators is widespread, but empirical studies [19, 20, 21] have shown that distributions of article citations are very skewed, even within single disciplines.”
From Universality of citation distributions: Toward an objective measure of scientific impact (2008) · cites this paper as [20]
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- Authors
- NARANAN, S.
- Affiliations
- Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (IN)
- Corresponding author
- NARANAN, S.
- Venue
- Journal of Documentation
- Publisher
- Emerald
- Published
- 1971-02
- Volume
- 27
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 83-97
- ISSN
- 0022-0418 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1981342820
- Cited by
- 72
- References
- 21
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2021: 2 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 3 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 3.55
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Documentation (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web visibility and informetrics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychology Research and Bibliometrics
- Keywords
- power-law relationship, scientific journals, scientific articles, citation analysis, bibliometric analysis, growth parameters
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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