Lotka's law: A testing procedure

摘要

Instead of the commonly accepted inverse square law, Lotka's original formulation was based on a more general inverse power law: xn·y = c. The exponent and the constant must be estimated from the given set of author productivity data. A step-by-step outline is presented for testing the applicability of Lotka's law. Steps include the computation of the values of the exponent and the constant based on Lotka's method, and the test for significance of the observed frequency distribution against the estimated theoretical distribution derived from Lotka's formula.