The community of scientists is characterized by their need to publish in peer-reviewed journals, in an attempt to avoid the "perish" side of the famous maxim. Accordingly, almost all researchers authored some scientific articles. Scholarly publications represent at least two benefits for the study of the scientific community as a social group. First, they attest of some form of relation between scientists (collaborations, mentoring, heritage,...), useful to determine and analyze social subgroups. Second, most of them are recorded in large data bases, easily accessible and including a lot of pertinent information, easing the quantitative and qualitative study of the scientific community. Understanding the underlying dynamics driving the creation of knowledge in general, and of scientific publication in particular, in addition to its interest from the social science point of view, can contribute to maintaining a high level of research, by identifying good and bad practices in science. In this manuscript, we aim at advancing this understanding by a statistical analysis of publications within peer-reviewed journals. Namely, we show that the distribution of the number of articles published by an author in a given journal is heavy-tailed, but has lighter tail than a power law. Interestingly, we demonstrate (both analytically and numerically) that such distributions are the result of an modified preferential attachment process.
翻译:科学家界的特点是,他们需要在经同行审查的期刊上发表文章,以试图避免著名的格言的“恶毒”一面。因此,几乎所有研究人员都撰写了一些科学文章。学术出版物至少代表科学界作为一个社会群体的研究的两个好处。首先,他们证明科学家之间有某种形式的关系(合作、辅导、遗产......),有助于确定和分析社会分组。第二,他们大多记录在大型数据库中,容易查阅,包括大量相关信息,方便科学界的定量和定性研究。了解一般知识、特别是科学出版物创造的基本动力,除了从社会科学观点来看对科学界的兴趣外,还有助于保持高水平的研究。在本稿中,我们的目标是通过对经同行审查的期刊出版物进行统计分析来推进这种理解。我们表明,作者在某一期刊中发表的文章数量是相当精细的,但比一项力量法的细小的尾巴。有趣的是,我们从数字学和实力学角度展示了这种分析的结果。