2009/12/21 by Massimo Franceschet, Franceschet, Massimo
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #cs.CY #cs.DL #scientometrics and bibliometrics research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0912.4188
I applied the goodness-of-fit methodology proposed in: A. Clauset, C. R. Shalizi, M. E. J. Newman. Power-law distributions in empirical data. SIAM Review 51, 661-703 (2009)
openalex publication_date 2009/12/21 · arxiv created 2010/02/15 · arxiv updated 2010/02/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Computer science is a relatively young discipline combining science, engineering, and mathematics. The main flavors of computer science research involve the theoretical development of conceptual models for the different aspects of computing and the more applicative building of software artifacts and assessment of their properties. In the computer science publication culture, conferences are an important vehicle to quickly move ideas, and journals often publish deeper versions of papers already presented at conferences. These peculiarities of the discipline make computer science an original research field within the sciences, and, therefore, the assessment of classical bibliometric laws is particularly important for this field. In this paper, we study the skewness of the distribution of citations to papers published in computer science publication venues (journals and conferences). We find that the skewness in the distribution of mean citedness of different venues combines with the asymmetry in citedness of articles in each venue, resulting in a highly asymmetric citation distribution with a power law tail. Furthermore, the skewness of conference publications is more pronounced than the asymmetry of journal papers. Finally, the impact of journal papers, as measured with bibliometric indicators, largely dominates that of proceeding papers.