# How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution

@article{Redner1998HowPI,
title={How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution},
author={Sidney Redner},
journal={The European Physical Journal B - Condensed Matter and Complex Systems},
year={1998},
volume={4},
pages={131-134}
}
• S. Redner
• Published 15 April 1998
• Physics
• The European Physical Journal B - Condensed Matter and Complex Systems
Abstract:Numerical data for the distribution of citations are examined for: (i) papers published in 1981 in journals which are catalogued by the Institute for Scientific Information (783,339 papers) and (ii) 20 years of publications in Physical Review D, vols. 11-50 (24,296 papers). A Zipf plot of the number of citations to a given paper versus its citation rank appears to be consistent with a power-law dependence for leading rank papers, with exponent close to -1/2. This, in turn, suggests…
1,367 Citations

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