power laws

[Don Turnbull]

Some might even argue that similar powerlaw studies go all the back to the turn
of the century with Pareto and his analysis of the distribution of wealth (which
I believe Zipf himself cites in "Least Effort"). I'd be curious to know of other
applications of these laws throughout science in addition to their use in
complexity studies (Bak, et. al).

I also surmise that Lotka, Bradford and Zipf are all derivative since they are
essentially in the same powerlaw "family". Any comments?

Don

Rousseau Ronald wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> May I point out that 'Lotka's law' studied by information scientists since
> 1926 is a power law. So is 'Zipf's law'. As far as I see it, information
> scientists have studied power laws since 'always'.
>
> The novelty of Sylvan Katz' approach lies in the fact that he has found
> new applications for these ubiquitous - power law - regularities.
>
> Ronald Rousseau
> KHBO - Zeedijk 101
> B-8400  Oostende  Belgium
>
> On Sat, 15 Jan 2000, Charles H. Davis wrote:
>
> > Dear Dr. Katz:
> >
> > Your communication was most welcome.  I've been trying for some time to
> > call power curves to the attention of the information science community.
> >
> > When I spoke with late Derek Price at an ASIS meeting in Banff in 1979, he
> > told me that he had "...thrown out a number of 'outliers'."
> >
> > See:
> >
> > D.J. de S. Price, "A General Theory of Bibliometric and Other Cumulative
> > Advantage Processes," JASIS 27:292-306 (1976).
> >
> > As a fellow physical scientist, I knew this was standard operating
> > procedure, but it worried me as he used the plural, not the singular.  It
> > has since come to my attention that acknowledgments follow a power curve
> > rather than an "ordinary" exponential distribution.  I'm now suspicious
> > about citation analysis generally and believe you or someone else should
> > pursue this idea.
> >
> > See also:
> >
> > Davis, Charles H. and Blaise Cronin, "Acknowledgments and Intellectual
> > Indebtedness: A Bibliometric Conjecture," Journal of the American
> > Society for Information Science 44(10):590-592 (December 1993).
> >
> > All this has has implications for how scientists actually do their work:
> > They may be as guilty of appeal to authority as historians.  What an
> > appalling thought!
> >
> > Please keep up the good work and stay in touch.  Thanks to the Internet,
> > we can now do such things easily.  Like you, I welcome observations from
> > all our colleagues.
> >
> > It's a new age.
> >
> > Cordially,
> >
> > Charles Davis
> > ========================================================================
> > Charles H. Davis, Ph.D., Senior Fellow          | Professor Emeritus
> > School of Library and Information Science       |        GSLIS
> > Indiana University at Bloomington               | University of Illinois
> > (812) 331-1322  Fax: (812) 855-6166             |    Urbana-Champaign
> > http://memex.lib.indiana.edu/davisc/davisc.html |
> > ========================================================================
> >

--
-------------------------
Don Turnbull
donturn at fis.utoronto.ca
http://donturn.fis.utoronto.ca/