Lotka's Law Revisited

Abstract

THEORIGINAL STATEMENT of what has come to be known as Lotka’s law was made in Lotka’s 1926 journal article, “The Frequency Distribution of Scientific Productivity”: “...the number (of authors) makingn contributions is about l/n2 of those making one; and the proportion of all contributors, that make a single contribution, is about 60percent.”’ To derive his “inverse square law,” Lotka used comprehensive bibliographies in chemistry and physics and plotted the percentage of authors making 1, 2, 3,...n contributions against the number of contributions with both variables on a lo<garithmic scale. He then used the leastsquares method to calculate the slope of the line that best fit the plotted data, and he found that the slope was approximately -2. Since the publication of Lotka’s original article in 1926, much research has been done on author productivity in various subject fields. The publications arising from this research have come to be associated with Lotka’s work and are often cited as proving or supporting his findings. However, a review of this literature reveals that Lotka’s article was not cited until 1941, that his distribution was not termed “Lotka’s law” until 1949, and that noattempts were made to test the applicability of Lotka’s law to other disciplines until 1973. The present article will discuss the literature that has become associated with Lotka’s law and will attempt to identify the important factors of Lotka’s original methodology which should be considered when attempting to test the applicability of Lotka’s law.