Scaling rules in the science system: influence of field-specific citation characteristics on the impact of research groups

TL;DR

This paper models science as a citation-density landscape to analyze how field-specific citation characteristics influence research group impact, revealing size-dependent patterns in bibliometric indicators.

Contribution

It introduces a novel landscape representation of science to study the scaling rules and interdependencies of bibliometric indicators across research groups.

Findings

Citation density varies significantly across fields.

Size-dependent scaling rules affect bibliometric indicators.

Top-performance groups show different scaling behaviors.

Abstract

We propose a representation of science as a citation-density landscape and investigate scaling rules with the field-specific citation density as a main topological property. We focus on the size-dependence of several main bibliometric indicators for a large set of research groups while distinguishing between top-performance and lower performance groups. We demonstrate that this representation of the science system is particularly effective to understand the role and the interdependencies of the different bibliometric indicators and related topological properties of the landscape.