ArticleScientific reports2020
The effect of dragon-kings on the estimation of scaling law parameters.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Recent advances in urban system science: Models and data.PloS one · 2022Pooled it
- Violence, city size and geographical isolation in African cities.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Non-trivial relationship between scaling behavior and the spatial organization of GDP in Indonesian cities.PloS one · 2022Article
- Urban population size and road traffic collisions in Europe.PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Scaling laws are used to model how different quantifiable properties of cities, such as the number of road traffic accidents or average house prices, vary as a function of city population size, with parameters estimated from data. Arcaute et al. raised the issue of whether specific cities with extremely large population sizes, known as dragon-kings, should be considered separately from other smaller cities when estimating the scaling law parameters since the two types of cities tend to display different behaviour. Through the analysis of randomly generated samples, we find that the inclusion of dragon-kings in the scaling analysis does not affect the estimated values for the parameters but only provided that all the data points satisfy the same scaling law. We also analyse randomly generated samples where data corresponding to a particular city deviates from the scaling law followed by the rest of the cities. We then show that deviations corresponding to dragon-king cities have the most significant effect on the estimated values of the scaling parameters. The extent of this effect also depends on which estimation procedure is used. Our results have important implications on the suitability of scaling laws as a model for urban systems.
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Registered trials
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