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

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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.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (Dirección General de Investigación) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF/FEDER, project SEJ2007-66236/SOCI). We thank K. Shashok for improving the use of English in the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Física, Universidad de Alcalá, 28871, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain

    Juan Miguel Campanario

  2. Departamento de Gestión de la Información Científica Integrada, Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología, C/Pedro Teixeira, 8 (planta 2), 28020, Madrid, Spain

    María Angeles Coslado

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  1. Juan Miguel Campanario
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  2. María Angeles Coslado
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Correspondence to Juan Miguel Campanario.

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Campanario, J.M., Coslado, M.A. Benford’s law and citations, articles and impact factors of scientific journals. Scientometrics 88, 421–432 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0387-9

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