@article{redner1998popular,
  abstract = {Numerical data for the distribution of citations are examined for: (i) papers published in 1981 in journals which are catalogued by the Institute for Scientific Information (783,339 papers) and (ii) 20 years of publications in Physical Review D, vols. 11-50 (24,296 papers). A Zipf plot of the number of citations to a given paper versus its citation rank appears to be consistent with a power-law dependence for leading rank papers, with exponent close to -1/2. This, in turn, suggests that the number of papers with x citations, N(x), has a large-x power law decay N(x)~x^{-alpha}, with alpha approximately equal to 3. },
  author = {Redner, S.},
  doi = {10.1007/s100510050359},
  eprint = {arXiv:cond-mat/9804163},
  interhash = {cf0b54f3514619888dfce1ec17accde4},
  intrahash = {ab39b67b23937efa55b91598c9d7f24b},
  journal = {European Physical Journal B},
  month = aug,
  number = 2,
  pages = {131--134},
  title = {How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution},
  url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9804163},
  volume = 4,
  year = 1998
}