Uncited papers in the structure of scientific communication

Journal of Informetrics. 2023. Vol. 17. No. 2. Article 101391.

Katchanov Y. L., Markova Y., Shmatko N.

The paper presents an in-depth study of uncited papers. For that, we explore the documents indexed in the INSPIRE database from 1970 to 2015. Uncited articles represent a complex bibliometric environment in which references are generated. The reference lists of uncited papers form a dynamic system partially responsible for the redistribution of scientific impact. Our task is to quantify the detailed structure of citations and references directly in terms of quantiles. We also study the entropy and the statistical complexity measure of references and citations of papers’ quantiles. We introduce a theoretical framework in which citation distribution is considered an asymptotic distribution of the largest values in a sequence of independent identically distributed random variables. We show that this asymptotic distribution is the generalized extreme-value distribution. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that the asymptotic behavior of citation distribution is close to (but not quite) the generalized extreme-value distribution.

Keywords: научная коммуникация, citation analysis, библиометрический анализ, scientific communication, bibliometrics, анализ цитирований, Uncited papers, scientific recognition, нецитируемые публикации, научное признание