Lotka’s law and author productivity pattern of research in law discipline

Abstract

PurposeThis study aims to analyze the productivity patterns of authors using law literature indexed in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) from 2016 to 2020 based on Lotka’s law. Lotka’s law of scientific productivity provides a platform for studying the variation between the actual and expected authors’ productivity patterns in a subject area over a specified period.Design/methodology/approachThis study covers 3,334 open access journal articles in law subject. The law journals are subdivided into two basic divisions, namely, public law and private law. This paper focuses on the journal-wise distribution of publications, subject-wise distribution of publications, annual growth rate (AGR) as well as compound AGR and applicability of Lotka’s law in both public and private law by applying the least square method followed by Pao and doing the K-S goodness-of-fit test. Student’s t-test and chi-square test have been applied to verify the significant difference between the public law and the private law literature.FindingsThere is no significant difference between the public law and private law publications on their publications per issue. The chi-square test showed that there is no significant difference between the year-wise publications in public law and private law. The authorship productivity in public law differs from the distribution of Lotka’s inverse square law, whereas it follows Lotka’s law in the case of private law.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is based on the articles published in open access English language journals which are indexed in the DOAJ.Originality/valueThis study will be useful to know the authorship productivity pattern of law literature for both public and private law individually.