Four empirical laws of bibliometrics--anomalous number, Lotka's, Zipf's, and Bradford's--together with Laplace's "law of succession" and de Solla Price's cumulative advantage distribution are shown to be almost identical. A simple model shows that the frequency forms conform with inverse square law over appropriate interval. (Fifteen…

A rudimentary description of Markov Chains is presented in order to introduce its use to describe and to predict authors' movements among subareas of the discipline of ethnomusicology. Other possible applications are suggested. (Author)

Identifies four components of a good predictive lossless image compression method: (1) pixel sequence, (2) image modeling and prediction, (3) error modeling, and (4) error coding. Highlights include Laplace distribution and a comparison of the multilevel progressive method for image coding with the prediction by partial precision matching method.…

Illustrates that the Poisson-lognormal model provides good fits to a diverse set of distributions commonly studied in bibliometrics and scientometrics. Topics discussed include applications to the empirical data sets related to the laws of Lotka, Bradford, and Zipf; causal processes that could generate lognormal distributions; and implications for…

Describes a study that was conducted to model the navigation patterns followed by users when retrieving information in hypertext systems. The development of two frequency distribution models is explained, the influence of search tasks on path patterns is discussed, and further research is described. (Contains 17 references.) (LRW)

Describes a technique for statistically comparing bibliometric models and illustrates its use with two examples using Lotka's hypothesis of author productivity and one example using library circulation frequencies. Topics discussed include nested statistical models, analysis of variance, regression, log-linear models, and the likelihood ratio…

Reports algorithm for calculation of term discrimination values that is sufficiently fast in operation to permit use of exact values. Evidence is presented to show that relationship between term discrimination and term frequency is crucially dependent upon type of inter-document similarity measure used for calculation of discrimination values. (13…