ArticlePloS one2016
Universality of Citation Distributions for Academic Institutions and Journals.
Article in PloS one, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Political expression of academics on Twitter.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- A network-based normalized impact measure reveals successful periods of scientific discovery across discipline.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Sandpile Universality in Social Inequality: Gini and Kolkata Measures.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Institution Publication Feature Analysis Based on Time-Series Clustering.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- On entropy research analysis: cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer.Scientometrics · 2018Article
- Science and Facebook: The same popularity law!PloS one · 2017Article
- Correction: Universality of Citation Distributions for Academic Institutions and Journals.PloS one · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Citations measure the importance of a publication, and may serve as a proxy for its popularity and quality of its contents. Here we study the distributions of citations to publications from individual academic institutions for a single year. The average number of citations have large variations between different institutions across the world, but the probability distributions of citations for individual institutions can be rescaled to a common form by scaling the citations by the average number of citations for that institution. We find this feature seems to be universal for a broad selection of institutions irrespective of the average number of citations per article. A similar analysis for citations to publications in a particular journal in a single year reveals similar results. We find high absolute inequality for both these sets, Gini coefficients being around 0.66 and 0.58 for institutions and journals respectively. We also find that the top 25% of the articles hold about 75% of the total citations for institutions and the top 29% of the articles hold about 71% of the total citations for journals.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.