Reviews informetric, or bibliometric, distributions, including Lotka's, rank frequency distributions, Zipf functions, Mandelbrot functions, Leimkuhler functions, and Bradford's formulations. An example of the use of these techniques to analyze song texts of Thomas Dolby is given, and results are reported that show a fit with a Leimkuhler function.…

Discusses the literature that has become associated with Lotka's Law of Scientific Productivity (a general theoretical estimate of author productivity in the sciences) and attempts to identify the important factors of Lotka's original methodology that should be considered when attempting to test applicability of Lotka's Law. Forty-seven references…

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…

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…

Discussion of informetric distributions shows that generalized Leimkuhler functions give proper fits to a large variety of Bradford curves, including those exhibiting a Groos droop or a rising tail. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is used to test goodness of fit, and least-square fits are compared with Egghe's method. (Contains 53 references.) (LRW)

This update of 1978 bibliometric study of online retrieval literature reveals that: literature has continued to grow, reaching peak annual output (504 papers) in 1981; conference literature has become centralized in four major proceedings; online retrieval papers have appeared in 479 journals; and 31 authors have contributed 10 or more papers.…

Analyzes the scale and significance of acknowledgment behavior in 10 highly ranked sociology journals over a 10-year period. Peer interactive communication is discussed; correlation between frequency of acknowledgment and frequency of citation is examined; and incorporating acknowledgment data into the academic audit process is considered.…

Explores the use of citation data in evaluating research performance of academic programs and individual faculty members based on a 10-year analysis of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. The use of three methods conjointly for allocating citational credit to multiauthored works is discussed. (Contains 35…