(definition)
Definition: The number of authors making n contributions is about 1/na of those making one contribution, where a is often nearly 2.
See also Zipf's law, Benford's law, Bradford's law.
Note: A power law; often nearly an inverse square law.
Contributed by Christiane Fritze <h0444who@rz.hu-berlin.de> July 2000.
Author: PEB
A short biography of Alfred James Lotka.
Alfred J. Lotka, The Frequency Distribution of Scientific Productivity, Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, 16(12):317-323, 1926.
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Entry modified 17 December 2004.
HTML page formatted Mon Feb 2 13:10:39 2015.
Cite this as:
Paul E. Black, "Lotka's law", in
Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures [online], Vreda Pieterse and Paul E. Black, eds. 17 December 2004. (accessed TODAY)
Available from: http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/lotkaslaw.html