I was told when I was a graduate student that the modal published research paper was cited zero times. They then when on to say that the median was one or two, while the mean depended on how good the journal was. Well, someone went looking in political science:
The article provides more basic statistics:
So, at least in political science the median appears to be 26 and the mean 71. That’s a lot higher than I expected, but that poltiical science articles tend to cite far more papers.
My only real thought is this: what question is each number answering. The mode really just let’s you know that the distribution is truncated at zero. It’s a mechanical artifact more than anything. The median, or any of the quantiles, on the other hand, seems only informative if you have a benchmark in your head of at what point an article seems to to be moving the literature. Is 26 substantial, or is it just inframarginal noise for the 90% of articles that don’t really matter? It seems to me all these numbers only matter as fractions of the maximum. If 8123 is the ceiling, how does that change how we interpret a paper with 7 citations?
Most of this seems more like academic appointment accounting, which is almost by definition uninteresting, but it’s a great reminder that statistics have no meaning absent a context that goes beyond other statistics. That said, with just a minimal context, it’s amazing how far knowing nothing but the mean, median, and mode can take you.
