Universality of citation distributions: towards an objective measure of scientific impact

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that citation distributions across various scientific disciplines and publication years follow a universal pattern when normalized by the average citations, enabling unbiased cross-field impact comparisons.

Contribution

It introduces a universal rescaling of citation distributions and proposes a generalized h-index for fairer comparison of scientific impact across fields.

Findings

Citation distributions are discipline-dependent but become universal after normalization.

The normalized citation indicator $c_f$ is validated as an unbiased impact measure.

A generalized h-index is proposed for cross-disciplinary impact assessment.

Abstract

We study the distributions of citations received by a single publication within several disciplines, spanning broad areas of science. We show that the probability that an article is cited $c$ times has large variations between different disciplines, but all distributions are rescaled on a universal curve when the relative indicator $c_f=c/c_0$ is considered, where $c_0$ is the average number of citations per article for the discipline. In addition we show that the same universal behavior occurs when citation distributions of articles published in the same field, but in different years, are compared. These findings provide a strong validation of $c_f$ as an unbiased indicator for citation performance across disciplines and years. Based on this indicator, we introduce a generalization of the h-index suitable for comparing scientists working in different fields.