Figure 5

Empirical distribution of citation impact values conditioned on publication number n . We aggregate the normalized citation z values of researcher profiles with first publication year $y_{i,0}^j\ge 1970$ for Nat./PNAS/Sci. and $y_{i,0}^j\ge 1960$ for the economic sciences, and with $L_i\ge 5$ and $5\le N_p\le 20$. Each panel shows the probability distribution $P(z(n))$ conditioned on publication number $n=1,\dots ,10$. The z-scores represented by each $P(z(n))$ represent a subset of the aggregate set of z values, independent of $L_i$ and $N_p$. Because the unconditional distribution of z values is approximately normal with mean 0 and with units of the standard deviation (${\sigma }_z=1$), we also plot a normal distribution $Normal(0,1)$ in each panel for reference (red curve).