Citation networks in high energy physics

The citation network constituted by the SPIRES database is investigated empirically. The probability that a given paper in the SPIRES database has k citations is well described by simple power laws, $P\left(k\right)\mathrm{}\propto k^{-\alpha },$ with $\alpha \approx 1.2$ for k less than 50 citations and $\alpha \approx 2.3$ for 50 or more citations. A consideration of citation distribution by subfield shows that the citation patterns of high energy physics form a remarkably homogeneous network. Further, we utilize the knowledge of the citation distributions to demonstrate the extreme improbability that the citation records of selected individuals and institutions have been obtained by a random draw on the resulting distribution.