6 January 2012: Similarities and Differences Between Citation Distributions. Seminar presentation by Javier Ruiz-Castillo
Comparing the weight of citations in different fields
It is well known that, due to vastly different publication and citation practices, the distributions of references made and citations received by scientific articles have very different characteristics across scientific fields. Using size- and scale-invariant statistical techniques to focus solely on the shape of citation distributions, in [1] and [2] we found that citation distributions share the same shape over three broad classes, are highly skewed, and are often crowned by a power law. However, we also present evidence that goes against the universality claim held in [3] at one key segment of citation distributions: the tip of the upper tail, or the place where citation excellence resides. Ongoing research shows that citation inequality due to differences in citation practices across 219 sub-fields is approximately constant between the 70th and the 97th percentiles. This finding leads us to search over this wide percentile range for an answer to the question "How many citations in my sub-filed are approximately equivalent to 10 citations in Physics?".
References
[1] Albarrán, P. and J. Ruiz-Castillo (2011), "References Made and Citations Received By Scientific Articles", Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62: 40-49.
[2] Albarrán, P., J. Crespo, I. Ortuño, and J. Ruiz-Castillo (2011), "The Skewness of Science In 219 Sub-fields and a Number of Aggregates", Scientometrics, 88: 385-397.
[3] Radicchi, F., Fortunato, S., and Castellano, C. (2008), "Universality of Citation Distributions: Toward An Objective Measure of Scientific Impact", PNAS, 105: 17268-17272.
About the author
Javier Ruiz-Castillo was born in Madrid, 1944. He took a BA in Economics at Universidad Complutense, Madrid, 1967, a MA in Economics at Essex University, United Kingdom, 1969, and a Ph. D. in Economics at Northwestern University, U.S., 1978. He has taught at Universidad Complutense and, from 1990, at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid. He acted as Director of the Spanish National Institute of Statistics in 1986-89. He has been a Visiting Professor at Iowa University, New York University at Stony Brook, Purdue University, Princeton University, Boston University, the Bureau of Labor Statistics at Washington DC, and ITAM at México DF. His fields are Public and Welfare Economics. Recently, his research has been in the field of Scientometrics.
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