Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Distribution of ranks of articles and citations in journals
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
The impact factor rank-order distribution revisited
Scientometrics
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
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We study the dependence of the shape of the rank-frequency distribution g on the shape of the size-frequency distribution f and vice versa. We show mathematically that g is convexly decreasing if and only if f is monotonically decreasing and that g has an S-shape (i.e., g is first convexly decreasing and then concavely decreasing) if and only if f is first increasing and then decreasing. To illustrate our mathematical results, we empirically analyze size- and rank-frequency distributions of the number of articles and of the impact factor of journals in various scientific fields. We find that most of the size-frequency distributions that we examine are first increasing and then decreasing. Most of the rank-frequency distributions that we examine have an S-shape. However, the concave part of the S-shape is sometimes very small.