Recency predicts bursts in the evolution of author citations
Abstract
The citations process for scientific papers has been studied extensively. But while the citations accrued by authors are the sum of the citations of their papers, translating the dynamics of citation accumulation from the paper to the author level is not trivial. Here we conduct a systematic study of the evolution of author citations, and in particular their bursty dynamics. We find empirical evidence of a correlation between the number of citations most recently accrued by an author and the number of citations they receive in the future. Using a simple model where the probability for an author to receive new citations depends only on the number of citations collected in the previous 12–24 months, we are able to reproduce both the citation and burst size distributions of authors across multiple decades.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2020
- Source ID
- 10.1162/qss_a_00070
Entities
People
- Aditya Tandon
- Alessandro Flammini
- Diego Raphael Amancio
- Filipi N. Silva
- Filippo Menczer
- Santo Fortunato
- Staša Milojević
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Indiana University
- National Council for Scientific and Technological Development
- São Paulo Research Foundation
- United States Navy
- University of São Paulo