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The dispersion of the citation distribution of top scientists’ publications

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Abstract

This work explores the distribution of citations for the publications of top scientists. A first objective is to find out whether the 80–20 Pareto rule applies, that is if 80 % of the citations to a top scientist’s work concern 20 % of their publications. Observing that the rule does not apply, we also measure the dispersion of the citation distribution by means of the Gini coefficient. Further, we investigate the question of what share of a top scientist’ publications go uncited. Finally, we study the relation between the dispersion of the citation distribution and the share of uncited publications. As well as the overall level, the analyses are carried out at the field and discipline level, to assess differences across them.

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Notes

  1. The complete list is accessible at http://attiministeriali.miur.it/UserFiles/115.htm. Last accessed on 6 September 2016.

  2. The harmonic mean of precision and recall (F-measure) of authorships disambiguated by the algorithm is around 97 % (2 % margin of error, 98 % confidence interval).

  3. Professors with <3 years on duty were excluded from the analysis.

  4. Abramo et al. (2012) demonstrated that this is the best-performing scaling factor.

  5. For ease of presentation, in the following we use “citations” in place of “field-normalized citations”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Studies of Research Evaluation Institute for System Analysis and Computer Science (IASI-CNR), National Research Council of Italy, Via dei Taurini, 19, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

  2. Department of Engineering and Management, University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133, Rome, Italy

    Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Anastasiia Soldatenkova

Authors
  1. Giovanni Abramo
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  2. Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo
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  3. Anastasiia Soldatenkova
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Correspondence to Giovanni Abramo.

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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Soldatenkova, A. The dispersion of the citation distribution of top scientists’ publications. Scientometrics 109, 1711–1724 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2143-7

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