Theory and experimentation on the most-recent-reference distribution

Abstract

The cumulative distribution of the age of the most-recent-reference distribution is the "dual" variant of the first-citation distribution. The latter has been modelled in previous publications of different authors but the former one has not. This paper studies a model of this cumulative most-recent-reference distribution which is different from the first-citation distribution. This model is checked on JASIS and JACS data, with success. The model involves the determination of 3 parameters and is a transformation of the lognormal distribution. However we also show that the first-citation model (involving only 2 parameters and which is easier to handle), developed in an earlier paper, gives enough freedom to give close fits to the most-recent-reference data as well.