Universality of citation distributions revisited

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 discuss the consequences of our findings for the measurement of scientific impact using citation-based bibliometric indicators.

• Publication year

  2011

• Venue

  J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol.

• Publication date

  2011-05-15

• Fields of study

  Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1002/ASI.21671arXiv 1105.2934
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

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