Citation dynamics

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Citation dynamics describes the number of references received by the article or other scientific work over time. The citation dynamics is usually described by the bang, that take place two–three years after the work has been published, and the burst size spans several orders of magnitude. The presence of bursts is not consistent with other models based on preferential attachment. Those models are able to account for the skewed citation distribution but their reference accumulation is gradual.^[1]

The dynamics of scientific production has changed significantly over the past years. Due to technological progress, the number of published papers has been increasing exponentially until now. This, along with a much shorter time needed for the article to be published, has affected the citation dynamics of the modern papers. Furthermore, if the reference list of the study includes papers published in different years, older papers tend to have more citations. This may not necessarily because they are better but just because they had more time to accumulate those references.