Recent research has found that select scientists have a disproportional share of highly cited papers. Researchers reasoned that this could not have happened if success in science was random and introduced a hidden parameter Q, or talent, to explain this finding. So, the talented high-Q scientists have many high-impact papers. Here I show that an upgrade of an old random citation copying model could also explain this finding. In the new model the probability of citation copying is not the same for all papers but is proportional to the logarithm of the total number of citations to all papers of its author. Numerical simulations of the model give results similar to the empirical findings of the Q-factor article.

最近的研究发现，精选科学家在高被引论文中所占的比例不成比例。研究人员推断，如果科学上的成功是随机的，并且引入了一个隐藏参数Q或才能来解释这一发现，那么这种情况就不会发生。所以，才华横溢的高Q科学家有很多高影响力的论文。在这里，我展示了旧的随机引用复制模型的升级也可以解释这一发现。在新模型中，所有论文的引用复制概率并不相同，而是与其作者所有论文的引用总数的对数成正比。模型的数值模拟给出的结果与Q因子文章的实证结果相似。