Understanding the Scientific Enterprise: Citation Analysis, Data and Modeling

The large amount of information contained in bibliographic databases has recently boosted the use of citations, and other indicators based on citation numbers, as tools for the quantitative assessment of scientific research. Citations counts are often interpreted as proxies for the scientific influence of papers, journals, scholars, and institutions. Given their importance in practical contexts, the interest in the study of bibliographic datasets is no longer restricted to specialists in bibliometrics but extends to scholars having very different primary fields of research. As a result, the recent past has witnessed a huge production of papers on this topic of research. The present chapter aims at providing a brief overview of the progress recently made in the analysis of bibliographic databases. In the first part of the chapter, we will focus our attention on studies devoted to the statistical description of distributions of citations received by individual publications. The second part is instead devoted at summarizing some recent research efforts towards the modeling of the citation dynamics and the growth of citation networks.