Citations to articles citing Benford's law: a Benford analysis (1602.01205v2)

Abstract: The occurrence of first significant digits of numbers in large data is often governed by a logarithmically decreasing distribution called Benford's law (BL), reported first by S. Newcomb (SN) and many decades later independently by F. Benford (FB). Due to its counter-intuitiveness the law was ignored for decades as a mere curious observation. However, an indication of its remarkable resurgence is the huge swell in the number of citations received by the papers of SN/FB. The law has come a long way, from obscurity to now being a regular subject of books, peer reviewed papers, patents, blogs and news. Here, we use Google Scholar (GS) to collect the data on the number of citations received by the articles citing the original paper of SN/FB and then investigate whether the leading digits of this citations data are distributed according to the law they discovered. We find that the citations data of literature on BL is in remarkable agreement with the predictions of the law.