Validating Citation Models by Proxy Indices

Accepted for publication in Journal of Informetrics: a new paper by Ania Cena, Basia Żogała-Siudem, Grzesiek Siudem, and yours truly (DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2022.101267).

Abstract. There are many approaches to the modelling of citation vectors of individual authors. Models may serve different purposes, but usually they are evaluated with regards to how well they align to citation distributions in large networks of papers. Here we compare a few leading models in terms of their ability to correctly reproduce the values of selected bibliometric indices of individual authors. Our recently-proposed three-dimensional model of scientific impact serves this purpose equally well as the discrete generalised beta distribution and the log-normal models, but has fewer parameters which additionally are all easy to interpret. We also indicate which indices can be predicted with high accuracy and which are more difficult to model.