Universality of citation distributions: Toward an objective measure of scientific impact

@article{Radicchi2008UniversalityOC,
  title={Universality of citation distributions: Toward an objective measure of scientific impact},
  author={Filippo Radicchi and Santo Fortunato and Claudio Castellano},
  journal={Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},
  year={2008},
  volume={105},
  pages={17268 - 17272}
}
We study the distributions of citations received by a single publication within several disciplines, spanning broad areas of science. [] Key Result These findings provide a strong validation of c(f) as an unbiased indicator for citation performance across disciplines and years. Based on this indicator, we introduce a generalization of the h index suitable for comparing scientists working in different fields.
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