Nice idea and analysis! I reproduced it as well with https://graphext.com and got similar clusters https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-kXsKezu2_S07rQn-0bjbHuUXHE...
- Number of top 3K per month of publishing - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1beAPP9ijruMUs5DN5wOVsBArvxP...
- Avg score of top 3K per month of publishing - https://drive.google.com/file/d/10nSIgH1a6DN6XrDU2DyMJTCgsIg...