Figure 2

Skewed citation impact distributions. The right-skewed $P(\tilde{C})$, which range across more than 4 orders of magnitude, illustrate the wide range of outcomes in scientific winner-takes-all prestige competitions [1], [41]. To account for censoring bias we show the $P(\tilde{C})$ for the economics arena (A) and for the Nat./PNAS/Sci. arena (B) by considering non-overlapping scientist cohorts according to when each scientist entered a given arena by conditioning on his/her first publication being in the indicated time window. In (C) we show the $P(\tilde{C})$ conditional on the career length within the arena. The dashed grey best-fit curves are calculated using the log-normal distribution maximum likelihood estimator.