We investigate how leaders emerge as a consequence of the competitive dynamics between coupled papers in a model citation network. Every paper is allocated an initial fitness depending on its intrinsic quality. Its fitness then involves dynamically as a consequence of the competition between itself and all the other papers in the field. It picks up citations as a result of this adaptive dynamics, becoming a leader if it has the highest citation count at a given time. Extensive analytical and numerical investigations of this model suggest the existence of a universal phase diagram, divided into regions of weak and strong coupling. In the former, we find an “extended” and rather structureless distribution of citation counts among many fit papers; leaders are not necessarily those with the maximal fitness at any given time. By contrast, the strong-coupling region is characterized by a strongly hierarchical distribution of citation counts, that are “localized” among only a few extremely fit papers, and exhibit strong history-to-history fluctuations, as a result of the complex dynamics among papers in the tail of the fitness distribution.