Lotka's law
A. J. Lotka published in 1926 an investigation of the statistical distribution of the productivity of authors based on Chemical Abstracts. He found an approximate mathematical formulary according to which most authors (60%) only contribute one document while a very small number of authors contribute a large amount of the total production of documents. The approximation is: The number of authors each contributing n articles is proportional to 1/n². If 100 authors each produce 1 article in a given period, 25 authors produces each 2 articles , 11 produces each 3 etc. In other words:
The number of authors making n contributions is about 1/na
of those making one contribution, where a is often nearly 2.
This law is often termed "the inverse square law of scientific productivity"
and is (with Bradford's law of scattering and
Zip's law) regarded one of the three classical
bibliometric laws.
Munch-Petersen (1981) is a Danish investigation of Lotka's law concerning the
distribution of authors of fiction prose translated into Danish in the period
1800-1899.
Literature:
Bookstein, A. (1977). Patterns of scientific productivity and social change: a discussion of Lotka's law and bibliometric symmetry. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 28(4), 206-210.
Egghe, L. (2005). Relations between the continuous and the discrete Lotka power function. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56(7), 664-668.
Egghe, L. (2005). Power Laws in the Information Production Process: Lotkaian Informetrics. Elsevier.
Gupta, D. A. (1987). Lotka's Law and productivity patterns of entomological research in
Nigeria for the period, 1900-1973. Scientometrics, 12(1-2), 33-46.
Kretschmer, H. (1983). The reflection of Lotka's Law in the structure of citations
of a journal. Scientometrics, 5(2), 85-92.
Kyvik, S. (1989). Productivity differences, fields of learning, and Lotka's Law. Scientometrics, 15(3-4), 205-214.
Lotka, A. J.: The Frequency distribution of scientific productivity.
Journal of
Washington Academy of Science, 1926, 16, 317-323.
Munch-Petersen, E. (1981). Bibliometrics and Fiction. Libri, 31(1),
1-21.
Nicholls, P. T. (1986). Empirical validation of Lotka's Law.
Information Processing & Management, 22(5) , 417-419.
Potter, W. G. (1981). Lotka's Law revisited. Library Trends, 30(1),
21-39.
Richardson, V. L. (1981). Lotka's Law and the catalogue?
Australian Academic & Research Libraries,
12(3), 185-190.
See also: Author; Laws in Information Science
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 03-01-2007