Explanations of the Bibliometric Laws

Abstract

Many librarians are familiar with Bradford's law of scattering as a description of how articles in a discipline are dispersed over the universe of journals. Similar and equally surprising regularities are found in a wide range of other areas, such as biology, economics, geography, and linguistics. This paper describes a number of the most prominent of these laws and reformulates them so as to reveal their underlying similarity. It is noted that all of these laws are in essence mathematically identical. The paper reviews several attempts that have been made to derive this common regularity from more basic principles, such as an underlying stochastic process or an information theoretic model of the human mind. It is suggested that one reason for the recurrence of these laws is that they are very stable and likely to result from a wide range of different causes.