Of all the immunology journals only 18 (17.1%) had a normal distribution of citations to articles, whilst only 9 (7.5%) of the distributions of citations to surgical articles were parametric (p = 0.026 χ2 test).
These journals with a normal distribution of citations publish only a small number of articles per year, and account for less than 5% of the 2001 immunology literature, and less than 2% of the surgical literature.
This is probably also why Google Scholar counts 17 citations (16 "normal") of my most recent paper whereas Web of Science only counts 9 – many of these citing articles were recently published.
The citation said "The Normal Heart," Mr. Kramer's play about the AIDS crisis in New York City in the early 1980s, proved theater can "change the world, save lives and move audiences to action".
This shows that self-citation is quite normal for most journals.
Two respondents indicated that norms are changing, so that overweight children are more and more regarded as having a normal weight (see Table 2 for citations).
Our finding that the distribution of number of citations is log-normal is in agreement with recent generative models of the citation network [21], [22] that predict a log-normal distribution for subsets of papers related by content similarity.
E. Grisebach, p. 70. 8. Citations of Metaphysical Disputations (DM) follow the normal practice of dividing the work into disputation, section, and subsection within that section.
However, the remarkable finding that – independent of discipline – citations follow a log-normal distribution which can be rescaled in such a way that citation numbers become comparable [10], [11], suggests that the mechanisms behind citation practices are universal across disciplines, and differences are mainly due to differing community sizes.
Significant deviation from this normal rate, however, prompts an examination by Editorial Development to determine if excessive self-citations result in an artificial inflation of the impact factor.
Furthermore, the citation impact of scientific articles is highly uneven, even within the same journal, following a log-normal distribution where 20% of articles account for 80% citations (the "20/80 law") [3].
