The citation network constituted by the SPIRES database is investigated empirically. The probability that a given paper in the SPIRES database has k citations is well described by simple power laws, P(k) proportional to k(-alpha), with alpha approximately 1.2 for k less than 50 citations and alpha approximately 2.3 for 50 or more citations. A consideration of citation distribution by subfield shows that the citation patterns of high energy physics form a remarkably homogeneous network. Further, we utilize the knowledge of the citation distributions to demonstrate the extreme improbability that the citation records of selected individuals and institutions have been obtained by a random draw on the resulting distribution.
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Lehmann et al. (2003) studied this question.
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