The study of citation distribution provides retrospective and prospective picture of the evolving impact of a corpus of publications on knowledge community. All distribution models agree on the rise of the number of citations in the first years following the publication to reach a peak and then tend to be less cited when time passes. However, questions such as how long it will continue being cited and what is objectively the rate of the decline remain unanswered. Built up of simple polynomial function, the proposed model is proven to be suitable to represent the observed citation distribution over time and to interestingly identify with accuracy when the major loss of citations happens. I calculate from the model the 'residual citations' representing the citations kept after a long time period after publication year. I demonstrate that the residual citations may be greater than or equal to zero, meaning that the 'life-cycle' of the corpus is infinite, contrary to what some researches termed to be around 21 years. This model fits the observed data from SCI according to R-sq which is greater than 98.9%. Rather, it is very simple and easy to implement and can be used by not highly-skilled scientometric users. Finally, the model serves as a citation predictive tool for a corpus by determining the citations that would obtain at any time of its life-cycle.

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This paper presents the results of an evaluation of the national research system in Morocco. The exercise focuses on the period 1997-2006 and includes a comparison with South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Tunisia, Algeria, Portugal and Greece. Ratings of highly ranked researchers are developed on the basis of their number of publications, number of citations and also their 'h-index' (or Hirsch index). Finally, we examine the empirical model set by Glänzel that related the h-index to the number of publications and the mean citation rate per paper for these 'upper-class' researchers. The use of this model confirms that the h-index is likely to reflect the importance and the quality of the scientific output of a given researcher.

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Over the last two decades, emerging countries located outside North America and Europe have reshaped the global economy. These countries are also increasing their share of the world's scientific output. This paper analyzes the evolution of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and G-7 countries' international scientific collaboration, and compares it with high-technology economic exchanges between 1995-1997 and 2010-2012. Our results show that BRICS scientific activities are enhanced by their high-technology exports and, to a larger extent, by their international collaboration with G-7 countries which remains, over the period studied, at the core of the BRICS scientific collaboration network. However, while high-technology exports made by most BRICS countries to G-7 countries have increased over the studied period, both the intra-BRICS hightechnology flows and the intra-BRICS scientific collaboration have remained very weak.