AN EXACT FORMULATION OF BRADFORD'S LAW

Abstract

An exact, discrete formulation of Bradford's law describing the distribution of articles in journals is derived by showing that Bradford's law is a special case of the Zipf‐Mandelbrot ‘rank frequency’ law. A relatively simple method is presented for fitting the model to empirical data and estimating the number of journals and articles in a subject collection. This method is demonstrated with an example application.