Highly-Cited Papers are More Likely to Cite Highly-Cited Papers

An interesting paper in PLOS ONE performed an analysis of all papers published in 2003 that are included in the intersection of the Scopus and ISI databases. They find that the most cited papers in the following 5 years are more likely to cite other highly cited papers than lower ranked papers are to cite highly cited papers relative to how much each group cited less highly cited papers. This is