Albarran, P; Ruiz-Castillo, J. 2011. References Made and Citations Received by Scientific Articles. JASIST. 62 (1): 40-49

[Eugene Garfield]

Albarran, P; Ruiz-Castillo, J. 2011. References Made and Citations Received by 
Scientific Articles. JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION 
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 62 (1): 40-49..

Author Full Name(s): Albarran, Pedro; Ruiz-Castillo, Javier
Language: English
Document Type: Article

KeyWords Plus: POWER-LAW DISTRIBUTIONS; CHARACTERISTIC SCORES; 
RESEARCH PERFORMANCE; PARAMETER-ESTIMATION; SCALES; INDICATORS; 
SCIENCE; IMPACT; INDEX; MODEL

Abstract: This article studies massive evidence about references made and 
citations received after a 5-year citation window by 3.7 million articles 
published in 1998 to 2002 in 22 scientific fields. We find that the distributions 
of references made and citations received share a number of basic features 
across sciences. Reference distributions are rather skewed to the right while 
citation distributions are even more highly skewed: The mean is about 20 
percentage points to the right of the median, and articles with a remarkable or 
an outstanding number of citations represent about 9% of the total. Moreover, 
the existence of a power law representing the upper tail of citation distributions 
cannot be rejected in 17 fields whose articles represent 74.7% of the total. 
Contrary to the evidence in other contexts, the value of the scale parameter is 
above 3.5 in 13 of the 17 cases. Finally, power laws are typically small, but 
capture a considerable proportion of the total citations received.

Addresses: [Albarran, Pedro] Univ Alicante, Dept Fundamentos Anal Econ, E-
03080 Alicante, Spain; [Ruiz-Castillo, Javier] Univ Carlos III Madrid, Dept Econ, 
Madrid, Spain

Reprint Address: Albarran, P, Univ Alicante, Dept Fundamentos Anal Econ, E-
03080 Alicante, Spain.
E-mail Address: albarran at ua.es; jrc at eco.uc3m.es
ISSN: 1532-2882
DOI: 10.1002/asi.21448
fulltext: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21448/full