Issue |
Europhys. Lett.
Volume 75, Number 4, August 2006
|
|
---|---|---|
Page(s) | 673 - 679 | |
Section | Interdisciplinary physics and related areas of science and technology | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/epl/i2006-10162-1 | |
Published online | 21 July 2006 |
Scaling behavior in the dynamics of citations to scientific journals
Departamento de Física, Universidade Estadual de Maringá Avenida Colombo 5790, 87020-900, Maringá-PR, Brazil
Received:
12
April
2006
Accepted:
4
July
2006
We analyze a database comprising the impact factor (citations per
recent items published) of scientific journals for a 13-year
period (1992–2004). We find that i) the distribution of impact
factors follows asymptotic power law behavior, ii) the distribution
of annual logarithmic growth rates has an exponential form, and iii)
the width of this distribution decays with the impact factor as a
power law with exponent . The results ii) and iii)
are surprising similar to those observed in the growth dynamics of
organizations with complex internal structure suggesting the
existence of common mechanisms underlying the dynamics of these
systems. We propose a general model for such systems, an extension
of the simplest model for firm growth, and compare their predictions
with our empirical results.
PACS: 89.90.+n – Other topics in areas of applied and interdisciplinary physics / 89.75.Da – Systems obeying scaling laws / 02.50.-r – Probability theory, stochastic processes, and statistics
© EDP Sciences, 2006
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