2019/11/27 by Filipi Nascimento Silva, Aditya Tandon, Diego Raphael Amancio +4
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Academic Writing and Publishing #Bibliometrics #Citation #Citation analysis #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Correlation #Process (computing) #Scientific literature #cs.CL #cs.DL #physics.soc-ph #scientometrics and bibliometrics research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1162/qss_a_00070
12 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2019/11/27 · openalex created_date 2019/12/05 · openalex publication_date 2020/06/15 · arxiv updated 2020/11/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The citations process for scientific papers has been studied extensively. But while the citations accrued by authors are the sum of the citations of their papers, translating the dynamics of citation accumulation from the paper to the author level is not trivial. Here we conduct a systematic study of the evolution of author citations, and in particular their bursty dynamics. We find empirical evidence of a correlation between the number of citations most recently accrued by an author and the number of citations they receive in the future. Using a simple model where the probability for an author to receive new citations depends only on the number of citations collected in the previous 12–24 months, we are able to reproduce both the citation and burst size distributions of authors across multiple decades.