Lotka’s law for the Brazilian scientific output published in journals
Abstract
Lotka’s law is a power law for the frequency of scholarly publications. We show that Lotka’s law cannot be dismissed after considering a massive sample of the number of publications of Brazilian researchers in journals listed on the SCImago Journal Rank and the Journal Citation Reports. For the SCImago Journal Rank, we found a power law with the Pareto exponent of 0.4 beyond the threshold of 50 papers. This means computing the ‘average number of publications’ of either a researcher or a discipline is of no practical significance.
Reference
@article{silva2018,
title = {Lotka’s law for the Brazilian scientific output published in journals},
author = {Sergio da Silva, Marcelo S. Perlin, Raul Matsushita, Takeyoshi Imasato, Denis Boreinstein},
journal = {Journal of Information Science},
year = {2018},
doi = {10.1177/0165551518801813},
issn = {1741-6485},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551518801813}
}