On the inequality of citation counts of all publications of individual authors

Abstract This paper focuses on the inequality of citation counts of all publications of individual authors. The American Physical Society (APS) dataset is used and a large-scale empirical study in the field of physics is conducted. The Gini index is employed to measure the inequality of the authors' citations among their publications. The results show that for most authors, their most numbers of citations come from a small percentage of their publications, and that such patterns are slightly more obvious for high-impact physicists. Yet, there is no any clear pattern on which of their publication(s) in which stages of career contribute most of their citations, i.e., their high-impact publications are randomly distributed in their academic careers. Furthermore, the robustness tests show similar results, indicating that the aforementioned results are valid. Such findings encourage researchers by providing a signal that it is never too late to work on a promising research project, regardless of the beginning or the ending stages of their careers.