Although scientometricians have focused on the strength of the citation impact of scientific publications, only a few have paid special attention to the width of the citation impact. In this article, we aim to understand the width by establishing our empirical study on a previously built structure, namely ego-centered citation networks (ECCNs). We remove the direct links to the focal publication and only retain the other edges in the network. Particularly, we examine the number and the size of the connected components of sub-networks of ECCNs in the whole Web of Science database. We find that the number and size of the connected components increase as the number of citations of publications rises, regardless of discipline, and that they are greater in recent publications than in older ones. We also observe that there are some differences in terms of the number/size of the connected components; particularly, the number/size of connected components for publications in Arts and Humanities is more “special” compared with other disciplines, and Natural Sciences tends to have greater values. These details are indicative in terms of the specializations of academia. Moreover, the findings have far-reaching implications on research assessment practices and literature searching.

尽管科学计量学家将重点放在科学出版物的引文影响力上，但只有少数几个人特别注意了引文影响的广度。在本文中，我们旨在通过对先前构建的结构（即以自我为中心的引文网络（ECCN））进行经验研究来了解宽度。我们删除了指向焦点出版物的直接链接，仅保留了网络中的其他边缘。特别是，我们在整个Web of Science数据库中检查了ECCN子网的连接组件的数量和大小。我们发现，随着出版物引用次数的增加，所连接的组件的数量和大小都会增加，而与纪律无关，并且与最近的出版物相比，最新出版物中的引用数量更大。我们还观察到，所连接组件的数量/大小存在一些差异。特别是，与其他学科相比，与人文学科相关的出版物的连接组件的数量/大小更“特殊”，自然科学往往具有更大的价值。这些细节是学术界专业化的指标。此外，研究结果对研究评估实践和文献检索具有深远的影响。