Presents Price's law, which states that half of the literature on a subject will be contributed by the square root of total number of authors publishing in that area, and assesses it against empirical evidence and simulated productivity distributions. The discussion covers this law's relation to Lotka's law and its empirical validity. (Author/CLB)

This study demonstrates that the number of references at the end of scientific research papers forms a strongly unimodal frequency distribution and that the generalized Gaussian-Poisson distribution fits such unimodal data extremely well. (three references) (Author/MES)

Investigates the Leimkuhler curve and the Gini index from a probabilistic viewpoint for studying the concentration of bibliometric distributions. The importance of the time parameter and the special nature of the "nonproducers" in bibliometric studies are examined, standard models of bibliometric processes are described, and further…

Presents a system of software and analysis for the development of mathematical models designed to explain the structure in large bibliographic data sets. The discussion covers the goodness of fit obtained in testing and replications, and the implications for the control of large information systems. (six references) (CLB)

Examines relationships among the parameters of the Zipf size-frequency distribution as well as its sampling properties. Highlights include its importance in bibliometrics, tables for the sampling distribution of the maximal value of a finite Zipf distribution, and an approximation formula for confidence intervals. (Author/LRW)

Reviews the literature on Bradford's law (i.e., an empirical relationship describing the distribution of scholarly articles in relevant journals). A model for the distribution of articles, based on random partitioning, is presented; and a mathematical formulation for a law of scattering is derived. The relationship of the model to Bradford's law…

Investigates the relationships between the parameters of the Simon-Yule model and the shapes of three bibliometric distributions: Lotka's Law of Scientific Productivity; Bradford's Law of Bibliometric Scattering; and Zipf's Law of Word Frequency. The results indicate that the probability of a new entry determines the characteristics of all three…