| Abstract: |
Using a large unique dataset consisting of 35.1 million authors and 105.3
million articles published in the period 2000-2016, which are classified into
29 broad scientific fields, we search for regularities at the individual level
for very productive authors with citation distributions of a certain size, and
for the existence of a macro-micro relationship between the characteristics of
a scientific field citation distribution and the characteristics of the
individual citation distributions of the authors belonging to the field. Our
main results are the following two. Firstly, although the skewness of
individual citation distributions varies greatly within each field, their
average skewness is of a similar order of magnitude in all fields. Secondly,
as in the previous literature, field citation distributions are highly skewed
and the degree of skewness is very similar across all fields. However, the
typical pattern at the field level results from the combination of its basic
skewness, solely dependent on the skewness at the individual level, and the
heterogeneity of individuals with respect to the number of publications per
author and their mean citation rates. These results have important conceptual
and practical consequences: to understand the skewness of citation
distributions at any aggregate level we must simply explain the skewness of
the individual citation distributions of their very productive authors. |