The citations process for scientific papers has been studied extensively. But while the citations accrued by authors are the sum of the citations of their papers, translating the dynamics of citation accumulation from the paper to the author level is not trivial. Here we conduct a systematic study of the evolution of author citations, and in particular their bursty dynamics. We find empirical evidence of a correlation between the number of citations most recently accrued by an author and the number of citations they receive in the future. Using a simple model where the probability for an author to receive new citations depends only on the number of citations collected in the previous 12–24 months, we are able to reproduce both the citation and burst size distributions of authors across multiple decades.

Classification of bibliographic items into subjects and disciplines in large databases is essential for many quantitative science studies. The Web of Science classification of journals into approximately 250 subject categories, which has served as a basis for many studies, is known to have some fundamental problems and several practical limitations that may affect the results from such studies. Here we present an easily reproducible method to perform reclassification of the Web of Science into existing subject categories and into 14 broad areas. Our reclassification is at the level of articles, so it preserves disciplinary differences that may exist among individual articles published in the same journal. Reclassification also eliminates ambiguous (multiple) categories that are found for 50% of items and assigns a discipline/field category to all articles that come from broad-coverage journals such as Nature and Science . The correctness of the assigned subject categories is evaluated manually and is found to be ∼95%.