Power Laws in Chess Openings

physics.aps.org

36 points·kurtosis··3 comments

As an aside, the article mentions how scientific paper citations exhibit a power law behaviour. Does anyone know where I might get my hands on some real world scientific citation graph data without having to scrape it together myself?

If you follow the literature referenced in this recent blog post you should be able to find what you are looking for. Also pay close attention to the content of shalizi and newman's review article - there is a lot of notorious and well known statistical sloppiness in the literature on power law distributions.

http://cs.unm.edu/~aaron/blog/archives/2009/11/power_laws_an...

It's especially interesting that they call the power law distribution of wealth into question.

EDIT: the link to the shalizi and newman review in the blog post is a link to a "buy this .pdf" site. Here's the mentioned article on the arxiv

http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062

Thanks, interesting paper. Are you a researcher in this area? If so, I was wondering whether you know of any work that tries to PREDICT an expected citation score for a paper based only on information available at its time of publication? For example, one obvious predictor would be the journal in which a paper is published, assuming a paper in a high ranking journal is more likely to have a high citation score in the future. However, I have a couple of other predictors in mind that might be interesting.

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