2026-07-072026-07-07http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/21374Recently we discovered (cond-mat/0212043) that the majority of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers. Here we show that a model, in which a scientist picks three random papers, cites them,and also copies a quarter of their references accounts quantitatively for empirically observed citation distribution. Simple mathematical probability, not genius, can explain why some papers are cited a lot more than the other.Disordered Systems and Neural NetworksPhysics and Societytext