Argues that a major difficulty in using Lotka's law in information science arises from the misuse of goodness of fit tests in parameter estimation. Three approaches for studying Lotka's law are presented: an index approach, a time series approach, and a generating mechanism incorporating these two influential variables to derive an equilibrium…

Demonstrates that the statistics of exceedances generates Lotka's Law--a widely-observed distribution of authors of scholarly papers and patents. The Frequency of production (papers or patents per year) and Lifetime (career duration) are exponentially distributed random variables. Empirical, phenomenological, and mathematical development shows…

Lotka's law is found to be invalid for papers published in library science. (PF)

Examines the applicability of Lotka's Law, negative binomial distribution, and lognormal distribution for institutional productivity in the same way as it is to authors and their productivity. Results indicate that none of the distributions are applicable for institutional productivity in engineering sciences. (Author/LRW)

Introduction: This paper studies the situation of research on Catalan literature between 1976 and 2003 by carrying out a bibliometric and social network analysis of PhD theses defended in Spain. It has a dual aim: to present interesting results for the discipline and to demonstrate the methodological efficacy of scientometric tools in the…

Lotka's Law, originally applicable only in physical science, is shown to apply reasonably well to the humanities. (Author/RS)

Demonstrates how the addition of a third "hidden" variable to the two parameters in Lotka's law makes this law equivalent, in a strictly logical sense, with Mandelbrot's law. Similarly, Lotka's inverse square law is made equivalent with Leimkuhler's law. It is also shown how Pareto's law fits into this framework. (29 references)…

Develops a new model for a process that generates Lotka's Law. Topics include measuring scientific productivity through the number of publications; rate of production; career duration; randomness; Poisson distribution; computer simulations; goodness-of-fit; theoretical support for the model; and future research. (Author/LRW)

Examines the validity of Lotka's function for a measurement of scientific productivity. A systematic deviation of this function from numerical examples has been found by introducing a different least-square formulation instead of a logarithmic linearization. Therefore, a modification of the measurement of the publication frequencies is proposed.…

Considers the problem of bibliometric prediction and the applicability of Lotka's law regarding the number of papers written by each author. Results of a study of 899 Management Information Systems (MIS) research articles published in 10 journals between 1975 and 1987 are described. (24 references) (LRW)

Discusses structural differences between author-publication systems and journal-article systems, i.e., articles can have more than one author. Frequency functions are examined; and a new conceptual explanation of Lotka's Law, based on convolution theory, is proposed. (Contains eight references.) (LRW)

After discussion of the equivalency of the information laws of Bradford, Leimkuhler, Lotka, and Mandelbrot, aberrations from Leimkuhler's law (including "Groos droop" as encountered in practice) are studied. Other aberrations of Leimkuhler's law are explained, starting from generalization of verbal formulation of Bradford's Law. (18…

Examines the robustness property of Lotka's law for scholarly papers with more than one author. Adjusted counts for assigning credit to authors proportionally are explained, and two bibliographies are analyzed using frequency distributions that show where the robustness property breaks down. (nine references) (LRW)

Reviews the bibliometric laws of Bradford, Leimkuhler, Mandelbrot, Lotka, Brookes, and Zipf, and classifies them in two groups, based on the use of mathematical logic and equivalency. (8 references) (CLB)

A common functional relationship among Lotka's law, Bradford's law, and Zipf's law is derived. The proof takes explicit account of the sequences of observed values of the variables by means of an index. This approach results in a more realistic and precise formulation of each law. (Author/EM)