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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.
Highlights
Citations are one of the most widely used indicators of academic impact and, as such, they have been studied extensively (Waltman, 2016)
We have studied the evolution of the citation dynamics of APS authors
As observed for papers, the citation distribution is broad and the dynamics are bursty, in that the number of citations collected by an author in a given interval can have sharp fluctuations
Summary
Citations are one of the most widely used indicators of academic impact and, as such, they have been studied extensively (Waltman, 2016). In the simplest models of paper citation dynamics based on preferential attachment, every paper keeps accumulating citations forever, at a slowing rate due to the increasing competition with newly published papers It is well known, that most papers have a finite lifetime, so that most citations are accrued within the first few years after publication and the probability of being cited often dramatically decreases thereafter (Stringer et al, 2008; Parolo et al, 2015; Hajra and Sen, 2005; Eom and Fortunato, 2011; Wang et al, 2013) — with some notable exceptions (Ke et al, 2015). We find that both distributions can be well described by a simple model whose sole driver is the number of recent citations
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