A model for the size-frequency function of coauthor pairs

Authors:
Leo Egghe
Affiliations:
Hasselt University, Diepenbeek Campus, Agoralaan, B-3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium, and Antwerp University, Stadscampus, Venusstraat 35, B-2000 Antwerp, Belgium
Venue:
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Year:
2008

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Abstract

Lotka's law was formulated to describe the number of authors with a certain number of publications. Empirical results (Morris & Goldstein, 2007) indicate that Lotka's law is also valid if one counts the number of publications of coauthor pairs. This article gives a simple model proving this to be true, with the same Lotka exponent, if the number of coauthored papers is proportional to the number of papers of the individual coauthors. Under the assumption that this number of coauthored papers is more than proportional to the number of papers of the individual authors (to be explained in the article), we can prove that the size-frequency function of coauthor pairs is Lotkaian with an exponent that is higher than that of the Lotka function of individual authors, a fact that is confirmed in experimental results. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.