Citations and the Zipf-Mandelbrot's law

Abstract

A curious observation was made that the rank statistics of scientific citation numbers follows Zipf-Mandelbrot's law. The same pow-like behavior is exhibited by some simple random citation models. The observed regularity indicates not so much the peculiar character of the underlying (complex) process, but more likely, than it is usually assumed, its more stochastic nature.

Comments: 20 pages, 10 figures, important reference and note were added