DP8126 The Skewness of Science in 219 Sub-Fields and a Number of Aggregates

Author(s): Pedro Albarrán , Juan A. Crespo , Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín , Javier Ruiz-Castillo

Publication Date: November 2010

Keyword(s): citation analysis , power laws , research performance

JEL(s): O31 , Y80 , Z00

Programme Areas: Industrial Organization

Link to this Page: www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP8126.asp

This paper studies evidence from Thomson Scientific about the citation process of 3.7 million articles published in the period 1998-2002 in 219 Web of Science categories, or sub-fields. Reference and citation distributions have very different characteristics across sub-fields. However, when analyzed with the Characteristic Scores and Scales technique, which is size and scale independent, the shape of these distributions appear extraordinarily similar. Reference distributions are mildly skewed, but citation distributions with a five-year citation window are highly skewed: the mean is twenty points above the median, while 9-10% of all articles in the upper tail account for about 44% of all citations. The aggregation of sub-fields into disciplines and fields according to several aggregation schemes preserve this feature of citation distributions. On the other hand, for 140 of the 219 sub-fields the existence of a power law cannot be rejected. However, contrary to what is generally believed, at the sub-field level the scaling parameter is above 3.5 most of the time, and power laws are relatively small: on average, they represent 2% of all articles and account for 13.5% of all citations. The results of the aggregation into disciplines and fields reveal that power law algebra is a subtle phenomenon.