Citation distribution of individual scientist: approximations of stretch exponential distribution with power law tails (1605.03741v1)

Abstract: A multi-parametric family of stretch exponential distributions with various power law tails is introduced and is shown to describe adequately the empirical distributions of scientific citation of individual authors. The four-parametric families are characterized by a normalization coefficient in the exponential part, the power exponent in the power-law asymptotic part, and the coefficient for the transition between the above two parts. The distribution of papers of individual scientist over citations of these papers is studied. Scientists are selected via total number of citations in three ranges: 102-103, 103-104, and 104-105 of total citations. We study these intervals for physicists in ISI Web of Knowledge. The scientists who started their scientific publications after 1980 were taken into consideration only. It is detected that the power coefficient in the stretch exponent starts from one for low-cited authors and has to trend to smaller values for scientists with large number of citation. At the same time, the power coefficient in tail drops for large-cited authors. One possible explanation for the origin of the stretch-exponential distribution for citation of individual author is done.