Lotka's law and the literature of computer science

摘要

From empirical data on the authorship of scientific papers, Alfred Lotka deduced an inverse-square law relating the number of authors of scientific papers to the number of papers written by each author. A basic assumption underlying Lotka's law is that the number of papers published by a scientist is a measure of his contribution to science. This assumption is debatable. In this paper Lotka's law is applied to the literature of computer science. The inconsistent results of earlier attempts to apply Lotka's law to the literature of various scientific disciplines, including computer science, are ascribed to the differences in sampling procedure and treatment of multiple authorship.