Author productivity and the application of Lotka’s Law in LIS publications

Abstract

The paper examines authorship pattern of 556 papers published in Journal of Documentation during 2003 to 2015. In addition to the papers, a sample of 1550 references from a population of 15,529 unique references given at the end of the papers was selected using simple random sample method. It was found that almost half of the publications were written by single authors. Lotka’s Law was tested on the resulting 2106 publications using Kolmogorov-Smrinov goodness-of-fit. The K-S test and the author productivity graph revealed that Lotka’s law was applicable to the set LIS publications.