  The distribution of scientific citations for publications selected with
different rules (author, topic, institution, country, journal, etc.) collapse
on a single curve if one plots the citations relative to their mean value. We
find that the distribution of shares for the Facebook posts re-scale in the
same manner to the very same curve with scientific citations. This finding
suggests that citations are subjected to the same growth mechanism with
Facebook popularity measures, being influenced by a statistically similar
social environment and selection mechanism. In a simple master-equation
approach the exponential growth of the number of publications and a
preferential selection mechanism leads to a Tsallis-Pareto distribution
offering an excellent description for the observed statistics. Based on our
model and on the data derived from PubMed we predict that according to the
present trend the average citations per scientific publications exponentially
relaxes to about 4.
