Bradford's law

Bradford's law describes how articles on a subject are distributed among journals: a small core contains many articles, while progressively larger groups of journals contain comparable numbers.

Bradford zones: Three groups of journals containing roughly equal numbers of articles on a subject, with each successive group larger than the previous one. They express the law's distribution as a core and two expanding peripheral zones.
Samuel C. Bradford: A British librarian and bibliographer known for work on scientific documentation and the distribution of journal articles. He formulated the principle from experience organizing subject literature.
Core journals: The relatively small set of journals that publishes a large share of articles on a particular subject. Identifying this set is the law's most direct practical use.
Lotka's law: A bibliometric regularity describing the frequency distribution of scientific authors by number of publications. It counts authors' output, whereas Bradford's law groups journals by articles on a subject.
Bradfordizing: A search-ranking technique that orders documents by source frequency, placing prolific sources first. It operationalizes Bradford's concentration pattern for ordering search results.
Bradford multiplier: The approximate factor by which the number of journals increases from one Bradford zone to the next. It quantifies the widening journal groups in the law's zone model.
Documentation: The systematic organization, description, and retrieval of recorded information. Bradford developed the law amid efforts to make scientific documents discoverable.
Library collection development: The process of selecting and maintaining resources for a library's collection. Bradford zones can help estimate which journals merit priority in a subject collection.
Zipf's law: A rank-frequency relationship in which frequencies decline approximately inversely with rank in some datasets. It describes term or item frequencies by rank, not the growth of journal groups across zones.
Bradford's law of scattering: Another name for the bibliometric principle that subject articles are scattered across progressively larger groups of journals. The term highlights the persistent question of how broadly subject literature is dispersed.

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