On the growth of citations of publication output of individual authors

► Time dependence of citations of publications of ten Polish professors is analyzed. ► Power law, exponential growth and progressive nucleation are used for analysis. ► Progressive nucleation mechanism is new for the analysis of growth of citations. ► We found that power law and exponential growth a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of informetrics 2011-10, Vol.5 (4), p.554-564
Main Author: Sangwal, K.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citation rate
Citations
Exponential growth law
Poland
Power law
Progressive nucleation mechanism
Publication output
Scholarly publishing
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Summary:► Time dependence of citations of publications of ten Polish professors is analyzed. ► Power law, exponential growth and progressive nucleation are used for analysis. ► Progressive nucleation mechanism is new for the analysis of growth of citations. ► We found that power law and exponential growth are inadequate to analyze the data. ► Progressive nucleation mechanism describes the data reasonably well. Dependence of citations L( t) at time t on the publication duration t of 10 arbitrarily selected Polish professors is analyzed using equations based on power law and exponential growth and on progressive nucleation mechanism for overall crystallization in fixed volume. The former two approaches are well known in the bibliometric literature, but the last approach is new for the analysis of growth of citations and other related phenomena. It was found that: (1) power-law relation and exponential growth are relatively inadequate to analyze the data of all authors due to large scatter in the L( t) data of various authors, (2) in view of poor fit at low or high values of t, the exponential growth relation is worse than the power-law relation, and (3) the progressive nucleation mechanism describes the data reasonably well and gives information on the processes of sources of citations and the growth of theses citation sources.
ISSN:1751-1577
1875-5879
DOI:10.1016/j.joi.2011.04.007