Measuring concentration within and co-concentration between informetric distributions: An empirical study

Abstract

There is a well-established literature on the use of concentration measures in informetrics. However, these works have usually been devoted to measures of concentration within a productivity distribution. In a pair of recent papers the author introduced two new measures, both based on the Gini ratio, for measuring the similarity of concentration of productivity between two different informetric distributions. The first of these was derived from Dagum's notion of relative economic affluence; the second - in some ways analogous to the correlation coefficient - is completely new. The purpose of this study is to develop a purely empirical approach to comparative studies of concentration between informetric data sets using both within and between measures thereby greatly extending the original study which considered just two data sets for purposes of illustration of the methods of calculation of the measures.