Bradford's law and the Nigerian entomological literature

Abstract

—Journal citations in Bibliography of entomological research in Nigeria: 1900–1973 were subjected to Bradford analysis with the view of evaluating the completeness of the bibliography and determining the core journals and core authors. As to the completeness of the bibliography, it was inferred that the bibliography is 93% complete in terms of journals and 84% complete in terms of articles. On further testing the law for its applicability on author distribution, it was observed that the observed value for total number of authors was just a little above 50% of the actual figure. This may suggest that as in a similar study Bradford’s law may not be as applicable to author distribution as it is for literature although the verbal formulation of the law has been found to be applicable to users distribution of periodical literature in a library. On the other hand, the investigation revealed that only three journals (i.e. 1.4% of the total number of 216 listed in the bibliography) form the core, while out of 650 authors, 21 constitute the core. The analysis also reveals an interesting phenomenon with the parameters (a measure of subject breadth being negative).