Analysis of Lotka's law: The Simon-Yule approach

摘要

A major difficulty in using the well-known Lotka's law in information science is in the estimation of parameters. In this paper, we argue that the difficulty arises from the misuse of goodness-of-fit tests. As an alternative, we adopt Simon's five-step modeling process for the study of Lotka's law. Three significant contributions can be identified. First, an index approach is used to identify a general formulation of Lotka's law. Second, a time series approach is used to identify two influential variables associated with the empirical data. Third, the constructive mechanism proposed by Simon is used to derive a distribution resembling the general formulation of Lotka's law. Further research on refining the constructive mechanism is suggested.