The Non-Gaussian nature of bibliometric and scientometric distributions: a new approach to interpretation

  • Authors:
  • Ludmila E. Ivancheva

  • Affiliations:
  • Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

An attempt has been made to give an answer to the question: Why domost bibliometric and scientometric laws reveal characters ofNon-Gaussian distributions, i.e., have unduly long tails? We triedto apply the approach of the so-called Universal Law, discovered byG. Stankov ([1997], [1998]). The basic principle we have used hereis that of the reciprocity of energy and space. A new waveconcept of scientific information has been propounded, in whichterms the well-known bibliometric and scientometric distributionsfind a rather satisfactory explanation. One of the made corollariesis that α = 1 is the most reasonable value for the family ofZipf laws, applied to information or social phenomena.