“Copied Citations Create Renowned Papers?”, 2003-05-08 (; backlinks; similar):
Recently we discovered that the majority of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers.
Here we show that a model, in which a scientist picks 3 random papers, cites them, and also copies a quarter of their references accounts quantitatively for empirically observed citation distribution.
Simple mathematical probability, not genius, can explain why some papers are cited a lot more than the other.