On the growth behavior of yearly citations of cumulative papers of individual authors

Using data generated by progressive nucleation mechanism on the cumulative fraction of citations of individual papers published successively by a hypothetical author, an expression for the time dependence of the number DLsum(t) of citations per year of progressively published papers by an author is proposed and then the time dependence of DLsum(t) of citations of papers published by selected authors is analyzed using the proposed equation. Analysis of the time dependence of the DLsum(t) data from the database for different selected authors revealed that the trends of the DLsum(t) data are approximately reproduced by an empirical expression of the time dependence of DLsum(t) similar to that of the cumulative citations Lsum(t) of the authors on t according to the progressive nucleation mechanism when this latter dependence approximates the power‑law expression. In other cases, there are large divergences between the predictions and data.