2003/05/08 by M. V. Simkin, V. P. Roychowdhury
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.dis-nn #physics.soc-ph
published as Annals Improb. Res. vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 24-27, 2005
arxiv created 2003/05/08 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
Recently we discovered (cond-mat/0212043) that the majority of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers. Here we show that a model, in which a scientist picks three random papers, cites them,and also copies a quarter of their references accounts quantitatively for empirically observed citation distribution. Simple mathematical probability, not genius, can explain why some papers are cited a lot more than the other.