Psychology of the Scientist: XI. Lotka's Law and Research Visibility

Abstract

Previous research has shown that, when scientists are rank ordered on the basis of number of publications and the number of publications is then plotted against these ranks, the resulting productivity curves are typically exponential in form. Citations to journal articles were analyzed to show that citations are similarly distributed, with the 10% most frequently cited articles receiving approximately 40% of the citations. Reanalysis of data published by Dennis (1954) suggests that there is little relation between the number of articles published by an author and the number of citations he receives per article.