Science and Facebook: the same popularity law!

TL;DR

This paper reveals that both scientific citations and Facebook post shares follow a universal distribution pattern when normalized, indicating similar underlying social growth mechanisms and selection processes.

Contribution

It demonstrates that scientific citations and Facebook shares share a universal distribution after normalization, supported by a model based on preferential growth and exponential dynamics.

Findings

Citations and Facebook shares collapse onto a single distribution curve after normalization.

A simple model explains the distribution using preferential growth and exponential dynamics.

Predicted average citations per publication will relax to about 4.

Abstract

The distribution of scientific citations for publications selected with different rules (author, topic, institution, country, journal, etc.) collapse on a single curve if one plots the citations relative to their mean value. We find that the distribution of shares for the Facebook posts re-scale in the same manner to the very same curve with scientific citations. This finding suggests that citations are subjected to the same growth mechanism with Facebook popularity measures, being influenced by a statistically similar social environment and selection mechanism. In a simple master-equation approach the exponential growth of the number of publications and a preferential selection mechanism leads to a Tsallis-Pareto distribution offering an excellent description for the observed statistics. Based on our model and on the data derived from PubMed we predict that according to the present trend the average citations per scientific publications exponentially relaxes to about 4.