Tag Archives | Citation Distribution

The Influence of Changing Marginals on Measures of Inequality in Scholarly Citations: Evidence of Bias and a Resampling Correction

Lanu Kim, Christopher Adolph, Jevin D. West, Katherine Stovel

Sociological Science August 10, 2020
10.15195/v7.a13


Scholars have debated whether changes in digital environments have led to greater concentration or dispersal of scientific citations, but this debate has paid little attention to how other changes in the publication environment may impact the commonly used measures of inequality. Using Monte Carlo experiments, we demonstrate that a variety of inequality measures—including the Gini coefficient, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, and the percentage of articles ever cited—are substantially biased downward by increases in the total number of articles and citations. We propose and validate a resampling-based correction for this “marginals bias” and apply this correction to empirical data on scholarly citation distributions using Web of Science data covering four broad scientific fields (health, humanities, mathematics and the computer sciences, and the social sciences) from 1996 to 2014. We find that in each field the bulk of the apparent decline in citation inequality in recent years is an artifact of marginals bias, as are most apparent interfield differences in citation inequality. Researchers using inequality measures to compare citation distributions and other distributions with many cases at or near the zero-bound should interpret these metrics carefully and account for the influence of changing marginals.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Lanu Kim: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
E-mail: lanu@stanford.edu

Christopher Adolph: Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle
E-mail: cadolph@uw.edu

Jevin D. West: Information School, University of Washington, Seattle
E-mail: jevinw@uw.edu

Katherine Stovel: Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Seattle
E-mail: stovel@uw.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank Clarivate Analytics for providing the Web of Science data, and Elena Erosheva, Bas Hofstra, and Joe Cho for helpful conversations. This research was supported by National Science Foundation grant #1735194, Katherine Stovel primary investigator, Jevin West co–primary investigator.

  • Citation: Kim, Lanu, Christopher Adolph, Jevin D. West, and Katherine Stovel. 2020. “The Influence of Changing Marginals on Measures of Inequality in Scholarly Citations: Evidence of Bias and a Resampling Correction.” Sociological Science 7: 314-341.
  • Received: June 16, 2020
  • Accepted: July 3, 2020
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a13


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