  The citations process for scientific papers has been studied extensively. But
while the citations accrued by authors are the sum of the citations of their
papers, translating the dynamics of citation accumulation from the paper to the
author level is not trivial. Here we conduct a systematic study of the
evolution of author citations, and in particular their bursty dynamics. We find
empirical evidence of a correlation between the number of citations most
recently accrued by an author and the number of citations they receive in the
future. Using a simple model where the probability for an author to receive new
citations depends only on the number of citations collected in the previous
12-24 months, we are able to reproduce both the citation and burst size
distributions of authors across multiple decades.
