Extending Lotkaian informetrics

  • Authors:

  • Quentin L. Burrell

  • Affiliations:

  • Isle of Man International Business School, The Nunnery, Old Castletown Road, Douglas, Isle of Man IM2 1QB, via United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The continuous version of the Lotka distribution, more generally referred to outside of informetrics as the Pareto distribution, has long enjoyed a central position in the theoretical development of informetrics despite several reported drawbacks in modelling empirical data distributions, most particularly that the inverse power form seems mainly to be evident only in the upper tails. We give a number of published examples graphically illustrating this shortcoming. In seeking to overcome this, we here draw attention to an intuitively reasonable generalization of the Pareto distribution, namely the Pareto type II distribution, of which we consider two versions. We describe its basic properties and some statistical features together with concentration aspects and argue that, at least in qualitative terms, it is better able to describe many observed informetric phenomena over the full range of the distribution. Suggestions for further investigations, including truncated and time-dependent versions, are also given.