Price's square root law: Empirical validity and relation to Lotka's law

Nicholls, Paul

doi:10.1016/0306-4573(88)90049-0

Cited by 50 publications

(24 citation statements)

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“…Esses autores adotaram uma abordagem da forma ranking da frequência, mas Nicholls (1988) proporciona uma abordagem pelo tamanho-dafrequência, que corresponde, mais acuradamente, à representação da Lei de Lotka.…”

Section: Resultsunclassified

Elitismo na literatura sobre a produtividade dos autores

Alvarado¹

2009

Ci. Inf.

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ResumoO objetivo deste artigo é identifi car, descrever e analisar os autores que conformam a elite numa subárea do campo da bibliometria: a produtividade dos autores, conhecida também como a Lei de Lotka. Como unidades de análises foi tomado cada um dos 376 diferentes autores produtores dos 390 artigos, capítulos de livros e trabalhos apresentados em congressos sobre a chamada Lei de Lotka, desde 1922 até 2003. Encontrou-se que a elite está formada por 17 autores que participaram da produção de cinco ou mais documentos cada um e contribuindo com pouco mais de uma terceira parte dos artigos. Palavras-chave

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Section: Resultsunclassified

Elitismo na literatura sobre a produtividade dos autores

Alvarado¹

2009

Ci. Inf.

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“…Further, a generalization of Price's law would contend that 50% of organizational output is generated by the square root of the total number of employees in an organization. Although Price's law is known to be inaccurate (Nicholls, 1988), nevertheless, simple calculation using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System of the U.S. Department of Education, plus publication data from Nicholls (1988, p. 473), suggests that about 7.26% of employees in U.S. universities which awarded 4-year degrees in 2009, were responsible for 50% of published papers. Put simply, organizational wealth is created by a few, but distributed to many.…”

Section: Are G and The General Factor Of Personality (Gfp) Correlatedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are g and the General Factor of Personality (GFP) correlated?

Irwing¹,

Booth²,

Nyborg

et al. 2012

Intelligence

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Highlights:>We examined whether the General Factor of Personality is correlated with g. >The analysis used data from 4,462 Vietnam era veterans randomly sampled from five million soldiers. >Measures were the MMPI and 15 cognitive ability tests. >Two hierarchical confirmatory factor models were jointly estimated. >The correlation between the general factors at the apex was -0.23. , that is, the higher the g score the higher the score on the GFP. One possible reason for the low correlation is restriction of range in the sample. Another is that intelligence and personality are to a degree mutually exclusive strategies, the first aimed at generating resources and the second at maximizing one's share of resources.Are g and GFP correlated?

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“…Further discrete calculations on Lotka's law in the connection of Price's law can be found in Egghe (1987). Practical investigations on the validity of Price's law can be found in Berg and Wagner-Döbler (1996), Nicholls (1988), and Gupta, Sharma, and Kumar (1998).…”

Section: A Characterization Of Price's Law Of Concentrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Zipfian and Lotkaian continuous concentration theory

Egghe

2005

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

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In this article concentration (i.e., inequality) aspects of the functions of Zipf and of Lotka are studied. Since both functions are power laws (i.e., they are mathematically the same) it suffices to develop one concentration theory for power laws and apply it twice for the different interpretations of the laws of Zipf and Lotka. After a brief repetition of the functional relationships between Zipf's law and Lotka's law, we prove that Price's law of concentration is equivalent with Zipf's law. A major part of this article is devoted to the development of continuous concentration theory, based on Lorenz curves. The Lorenz curve for power functions is calculated and, based on this, some important concentration measures such as the ones of Gini, Theil, and the variation coefficient. Using Lorenz curves, it is shown that the concentration of a power law increases with its exponent and this result is interpreted in terms of the functions of Zipf and Lotka. IntroductionThe historical law of Lotka (1926) is the basis of modern informetrics and is expressed as follows: the number of authors with n (n ϭ 1,2,3, . . .) publications is proportional to where a Ͼ 0. In other words, there is a constant C Ͼ 0 such that (1) where f(n) denotes the number of authors with n publications. More generally, f(n) can denote the number of sources (authors, journals, word types...) with n items (publications, articles, word occurrences, respectively); henceforth, this dual source/item terminology will be used (see also Egghe, 1989Egghe, , 1990Egghe and Rousseau, 1990a).A totally different informetric formulation, originating from linguistics (in terms of word types and word occurrences) is given by the Zipf law: If we rank the sourcesaccording to their number of items (starting with the source with the highest number of items, hence giving to this source the rank r ϭ 1) then the number of items in the source on rank r (r ϭ 1, 2, 3, . . .) is proportional to where b Ͼ 0. In other words, denoting by g(r) this number of items in the source on rank r, there exists a constant D Ͼ 0 such thatAlthough their informetric definitions are different (they are dual in the sense that, in f and g, the roles of sources and items are interchanged), the functions 1 and 2 are mathematically the same, namely decreasing power laws. A power law is the most occurring regularity in informetrics and far beyond (e.g., also found in economics and sociology, including the description of social networks, see e.g., Egghe and Rousseau, 2003 and references therein) and has the characterizing property (see Roberts, 1979) that, if the argument (x) is multiplied by a constant, k, we obtain the same power law with the same exponent: for we have (ϳ denotes is proportional to). This self-similar property explains its widespread occurrence in real-life examples and also its use in the description of power type informetrics in terms of self-similar fractals (see Feder, 1988). Intuitively, the self-similarity expresses that, independent of the scale at which we examine an "object...

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Price's square root law: Empirical validity and relation to Lotka's law

Cited by 50 publications

References 10 publications

Elitismo na literatura sobre a produtividade dos autores

Elitismo na literatura sobre a produtividade dos autores

Are g and the General Factor of Personality (GFP) correlated?

Zipfian and Lotkaian continuous concentration theory

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