Scaling rules in the science system: Influence of field-specific citation characteristics on the impact of research groups

A representation of science as a citation density landscape is proposed and scaling rules with the field-specific citation density as a main topological property are investigated. The focus is on the size-dependence of several main bibliometric indicators for a large set of research groups while distinguishing between top-performance and lower-performance groups. It is demonstrated that this representation of the science system is particularly effective to understand the role and the interdependencies of the different bibliometric indicators and related topological properties of the landscape.