Shooting Stars and Sleeping Beauties: the Secret Life of Citations.

This paper analyses the pattern of citations for papers published in 1990 across 6 MS/OR journals. A stochastic model is proposed which views the generating mechanism of citations as a gamma mixture of Poisson processes generating overall a negative binomial distribution. The model is extended to include obsolescence, i.e., the citation rate for a paper varies over its cited lifetime. The research then identifies specfic patterns of behaviour such as sleeping beauties or shooting stars. Conclusions concerning the predictability of future citations, and future research are discussed