Recency predicts bursts in the evolution of author citations
This addresses the challenge of understanding citation dynamics at the author level for researchers and bibliometric analysts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing paper-level citation studies.
The study tackled the problem of predicting author-level citation bursts by analyzing the correlation between recent citation counts and future citation accumulation, finding that a simple model based on recency can accurately reproduce citation and burst size distributions across decades.
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.