“How Popular Is Your Paper? An Empirical Study of the Citation Distribution”, 1998-04-15 (; backlinks; similar):
Numerical data for the distribution of citations are examined for: (1) papers published in 1981 in journals which are catalogued by the Institute for Scientific Information (783,339 papers) and (2) 20 years of publications in Physical Review D, vols. 11–50 (n = 24,296 papers).
A Zipf plot of the number of citations to a given paper versus its citation rank appears to be consistent with a power-law dependence for leading rank papers, with exponent close to −1⁄2.
This, in turn, suggests that the number of papers with x citations, N(x), has a large-x power law decay N(x)−α, with α ~ 3.