# Universality of citation distributions revisited

@article{Waltman2012UniversalityOC,
title={Universality of citation distributions revisited},
author={Ludo Waltman and Nees Jan van Eck and Anthony F. J. van Raan},
journal={J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol.},
year={2012},
volume={63},
pages={72-77}
}
• Published 15 May 2011
• Physics
• J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol.
Radicchi, Fortunato, and Castellano (2008) claim that, apart from a scaling factor, all fields of science are characterized by the same citation distribution. We present a large-scale validation study of this universality-of-citation-distributions claim. Our analysis shows that claiming citation distributions to be universal for all fields of science is not warranted. Although many fields indeed seem to have fairly similar citation distributions, there are exceptions as well. We also briefly…

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