Knowra Lotka's law Lotka's law Lotka's law is an empirical bibliometric relationship stating that the number of authors publishing n papers is approximately proportional to 1/n². It describes the skewed productivity distribution in scholarly authorship.
Bibliometrics : The quantitative study of publications, citations, and other forms of scholarly communication. Lotka's law is a statistical regularity used to describe publication productivity.
Alfred J. Lotka : A mathematician and statistician whose work included population dynamics and the quantitative study of scientific authorship. His 1926 analysis of chemistry and physics authorship supplied the relationship's classic formulation.
Informetrics : The quantitative study of information production, storage, retrieval, and use. Lotka's law is one regularity examined in the broader measurement of information activity.
Bradford's law : A bibliometric regularity describing how articles on a subject are distributed across journals. It concerns journal scattering, not the number of papers produced by each author.
Power law : A mathematical relationship in which one quantity varies as a power of another. Lotka's inverse-square form is a power law with exponent negative two.
Scientific productivity : The amount of scholarly work produced by an individual, group, or institution. Lotka's original question concerned how scientific output is distributed among authors.
Scientific collaboration : Cooperative work by researchers that produces shared scholarly outputs. Coauthored papers complicate the assignment of productivity to individual authors.
Zipf's law : An empirical pattern in which the frequency of an item declines approximately as the reciprocal of its rank. It is another skewed frequency law, but it ranks item frequencies rather than author productivity counts.
Probability distribution : A function describing the probabilities or frequencies of possible values of a variable. Author productivity can be represented as a distribution over publication counts.
Chemical Abstracts : An abstracting and indexing service for chemical literature, established in 1907. Lotka used its records to count authors' publication totals in chemistry.
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