Library and information science literature and Lotka's Law

摘要

Reports results of a study to test the validity of Lotka's Law in the field of library and information science (LIS), using the personal authors taken from the annual Name Index of Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) for 1992 and the annual Author Index of LISA for 1993 as the base for obtaining data. LISA was used as it was found to be more comprehensive than other abstracting and indexing services in the LIS field. The author productivity patterns for these 2 years were measured by noting: the number of authors publishing 1 article, the number of authors publishing 2 articles and finally, the number of authors publishing 5 articles. The value for the Lotka factor (n) was calculated to be 3.23 for 1992 data and 3.1 for1993 data. Concludes that Lotka's Law is applicable to the LIS field.