Citation Patterns in the Journals of Statistics and Probability

Abstract

This is a study of the use of citation data to investigate the role statistics journals play in communication within that field and between statistics and other fields. The study looks at citations as import-export statistics reflecting intellectual influence. The principal findings include: there is little variability in both the number and diversity of imports, but great variability in both the number and diversity of exports and hence in the balance of trade; there is a tendency for influence to flow from theory to applications to a much greater extent than in the reverse direction; there is little communication between statistics and probability journals. The export scores model is introduced and employed to map a set of journals' bilateral intellectual influences onto a one-dimensional scale, and the Cox effect is identified as a phenomenon that can occur when a disciplinary paper attracts a large degree of attention from outside its discipline.