Benford’s law and citations, articles and impact factors of scientific journals

Juan Miguel Campanario () and María Angeles Coslado ()
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Juan Miguel Campanario: Universidad de Alcalá
María Angeles Coslado: Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología

Scientometrics, 2011, vol. 88, issue 2, No 6, 432 pages

Abstract: Abstract First order digits in data sets of natural and social data often follow a distribution called Benford’s law. We studied the number of articles published, citations received and impact factors of all journals indexed in the Science Citation Index from 1998 to 2007. We tested their compliance with Benford’s law. Citations data followed Benford’s law remarkably well in all years studied. However, for the data on the numbers of articles, the differences between the values predicted by Benford’s law and the observed values were always statistically significant. This was also the case for most data for impact factors.

Keywords: Benford law; Citations; Articles; Impact factor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-011-0387-9

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