Inequality of authors’ reference reuse

Abstract

This brief communication finds a clear and universal inequality of authors’ reference reuse behaviour. We observe that a few references are reused many times in an author’s oeuvre while most of his or her references only occur in the reference list for quite a limited number of times. A power law distribution depicts such an inequality. We particularly utilise the power value, $\alpha$ , to characterise the nuanced difference of such inequalities. A pilot study based upon Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) shows that the $\alpha$ tends to be normally distributed, regardless of whether it is from a citing or a cited perspective. Our empirical study also reveals that the $\alpha$ of highly cited publications tends to be greater than that of lowly cited ones, yet we also observe a saturation when the number of citations increases.