The paper proposes a heuristic approach to modeling the cumulative distribution of citations of papers in scientific journals by means of the Wakeby distribution. The Markov process of citation leading to the Wakeby distribution is analyzed using the terminal time formalism. The Wakeby distribution is derived in the paper from the simple and general inhomogeneous Choquet-Deny convolution equation for a non-probability measure. We give statistical evidence that the Wakeby distribution is a reasonable approximation of the empirical citation distributions. AMS Subject Classification: 91D30; 91D99.
Keywords: Bibliometrics; Choquet – Deny convolution equation; Citation distributions; Wakeby distribution.