The measurement of low- and high-impact in citation distributions: technical results

This paper introduces a novel methodology for comparing the citation distributions of research units working in the same homogeneous field. Given a critical citation level (CCL), we suggest using two real valued indicators to describe the shape of any distribution: a highimpact and a low-impact measure defined over the set of articles with citations above or below the CCL. The key to this methodology is the identification of a citation distribution with an income distribution. Once this step is taken, it is easy to realize that the measurement of lowimpact coincides with the measurement of economic poverty. In turn, it is equally natural to identify the measurement of high-impact with the measurement of a certain notion of economic affluence. On the other hand, it is seen that the ranking of citation distributions according to a family of low-impact measures, originally suggested by Foster et al. (1984) for the measurement of economic poverty, is essentially characterized by a number of desirable axioms. Appropriately redefined, these same axioms lead to the selection of an equally convenient class of decomposable high-impact measures. These two families are shown to satisfy other interesting properties that make them potentially useful in empirical applications, including the comparison of research units working in different fields.

Growing Networks: Limit in-degree distribution for arbitrary out-degree one

We compute the stationary in-degree probability, $P_{in}(k)$, for a growing network model with directed edges and arbitrary out-degree probability. In particular, under preferential linking, we find that if the nodes have a light tail (finite variance) out-degree distribution, then the corresponding in-degree one behaves as $k^{-3}$. Moreover, for an out-degree distribution with a scale invariant tail, $P_{out}(k)\sim k^{-\alpha}$, the corresponding in-degree distribution has exactly the same asymptotic behavior only if $2<\alpha<3$ (infinite variance). Similar results are obtained when attractiveness is included. We also present some results on descriptive statistics measures %descriptive statistics such as the correlation between the number of in-going links, $D_{in}$, and outgoing links, $D_{out}$, and the conditional expectation of $D_{in}$ given $D_{out}$, and we calculate these measures for the WWW network. Finally, we present an application to the scientific publications network. The results presented here can explain the tail behavior of in/out-degree distribution observed in many real networks.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, v2 adds a section on descriptive statistics, an analisis on www network, typos adde

Editorial for the First Workshop on Mining Scientific Papers: Computational Linguistics and Bibliometrics

The workshop "Mining Scientific Papers: Computational Linguistics and Bibliometrics" (CLBib 2015), co-located with the 15th International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference (ISSI 2015), brought together researchers in Bibliometrics and Computational Linguistics in order to study the ways Bibliometrics can benefit from large-scale text analytics and sense mining of scientific papers, thus exploring the interdisciplinarity of Bibliometrics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The goals of the workshop were to answer questions like: How can we enhance author network analysis and Bibliometrics using data obtained by text analytics? What insights can NLP provide on the structure of scientific writing, on citation networks, and on in-text citation analysis? This workshop is the first step to foster the reflection on the interdisciplinarity and the benefits that the two disciplines Bibliometrics and Natural Language Processing can drive from it.Comment: 4 pages, Workshop on Mining Scientific Papers: Computational Linguistics and Bibliometrics at ISSI 201

The evaluation of citation distributions.

This paper reviews a number of recent contributions that demonstrate that a blend of welfare economics and statistical analysis is useful in the evaluation of the citations received by scientific papers in the periodical literature. The paper begins by clarifying the role of citation analysis in the evaluation of research. Next, a summary of results about the citation distributions’ basic features at different aggregation levels is offered. These results indicate that citation distributions share the same broad shape, are highly skewed, and are often crowned by a power law. In light of this evidence, a novel methodology for the evaluation of research units is illustrated by comparing the high- and low-citation impact achieved by the U.S., the European Union, and the rest of the world in 22 scientific fields. However, contrary to recent claims, it is shown that mean normalization at the sub-field level does not lead to a universal distribution. Nevertheless, among other topics subject to ongoing research, it appears that this lack of universality does not preclude sensible normalization procedures to compare the citation impact of articles in different scientific fields.

Empirical Patterns in Google Scholar Citation Counts

Scholarly impact may be metricized using an author's total number of citations as a stand-in for real worth, but this measure varies in applicability between disciplines. The detail of the number of citations per publication is nowadays mapped in much more detail on the Web, exposing certain empirical patterns. This paper explores those patterns, using the citation data from Google Scholar for a number of authors.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Cyberpatterns 201

Quantum group invariant, nonextensive quantum statistical mechanics

We study the consequences of introducing quantum group invariance in the formalism of nonextensive quantum statistical mechanics. We find that the corresponding thermodynamical system is equivalent to a Bose-Einstein gas in the Boltzmann-Gibbs formalism with a higher critical temperature than the standard Bose-Einstein case.Comment: Revtex file, 6 pages, one figure. The original article has been expanded to include some additional comments, one figure and a discussion regarding the critical temperature. One reference adde