We investigated a broad spectrum of factors in order to identify one or a few that are the primary determinant of citation scores of scientific papers. Our focus is on a large field of applied science, chemical engineering. A set of 226 papers written by 18 internationally recognized scientists (‘top-authors’) and citations to these papers has been used as a data source. Using multiple regression analysis, we found that the factor ‘top-author,’ i.e., the ‘personal variation,’ contributes the largest number of citations. Other important factors are number of references, language, journal category, and journal influence.
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Peters et al. (1994) studied this question.