Hunting for supernovae articles in the universe of scientometrics
This addresses a niche issue in scientometrics for researchers analyzing citation patterns, but it is incremental as it focuses on a specific anomaly without broader implications.
The paper investigates the existence of 'supernovae' articles in Google Scholar, defined as those with a sudden spike in citations followed by a sharp drop, and concludes by resolving whether such articles exist.
This short note records an unusual situation with some Google Scholar's profiles that imply the existence of "supernovae" articles, i.e., articles whose impact -- in terms of number of citations -- in a single year gets (almost) an order of magnitude higher than the previous year and immediate drops (and remains steady) to a very low level after the next year. We analyse the issue and resolve the situation providing an answer whether there exist supernovae articles.