Fig. 2.

Growing citation impact inequality and its influence on the changing distances. (A) Lorentz curves and Gini coefficients (Inset) describing the distribution of citations to target papers (i.e., citation impact). Target papers with only one citation are omitted from the distributions, because they don’t affect distance, which is the subject of this study. (B) The increase in distances after removing the highest-impact papers from the network. At each removal, the average distances have been estimated on a repeated sample of 2,000 nodes. The error bars show the SDs of the average distances across the 30 repetitions.