Recency predicts bursts in the evolution of author citations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how recent citation activity influences future author citation bursts, demonstrating that short-term citation dynamics can predict long-term citation patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a simple model linking recent citation counts to future citation bursts, effectively reproducing observed citation distribution patterns over decades.

Findings

Recent citations strongly correlate with future citation bursts.

A model based on short-term citation history predicts long-term citation dynamics.

Empirical data supports the model's ability to replicate citation distribution patterns.

Abstract

The citations process for scientific papers has been studied extensively. But while the citations accrued by authors are the sum of the citations of their papers, translating the dynamics of citation accumulation from the paper to the author level is not trivial. Here we conduct a systematic study of the evolution of author citations, and in particular their bursty dynamics. We find empirical evidence of a correlation between the number of citations most recently accrued by an author and the number of citations they receive in the future. Using a simple model where the probability for an author to receive new citations depends only on the number of citations collected in the previous 12-24 months, we are able to reproduce both the citation and burst size distributions of authors across multiple decades.