Newman, MEJ "Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law" Contemporary Physics 46 (5). SEP-OCT 2005. p.323-351

[Quentin L. Burrell]

Eugene

Many thanks for this.

I contacted Mark Newman and you can find this among his other publications
at

  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/pubs.html

It is a survey article and - after a quick look - seems worth further study.
I particularly liked the fact that he acknowledges that these laws usually
apply only to the upper tails of the distributions to which they are
applied. This is a point that has always worried me in informetric
applications where people are too quick to claim a straight line in the
log-log graph.

 Incidentally, Derek Price's foundation paper is mentioned but nothing else
from the informetrics field! We need greater impact!

Seasonal greetings to all

Quentin

**********************************
Dr Quentin L Burrell
Isle of Man International Business School
The Nunnery
Old Castletown Road
Douglas
Isle of Man IM2 1QB
via United Kingdom

www.ibs.ac.im



----- Original Message -----
From: "Eugene Garfield" <garfield at CODEX.CIS.UPENN.EDU>
To: <SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 9:16 PM
Subject: [SIGMETRICS] Newman, MEJ "Power laws, Pareto distributions and
Zipf's law" Contemporary Physics 46 (5). SEP-OCT 2005. p.323-351


> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
> E-mail Addresses: Newman, MEJ  :  mejn at umich.edu
>
> TITLE:          Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law (Review,
>                English)
> AUTHOR:         Newman, MEJ
>
> Source:         CONTEMPORARY PHYSICS 46 (5): 323-351 SEP-OCT 2005
>
> Document Type: Review     Language: English
> Cited References: 70      Times Cited: 0
>
> Abstract:
> When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity
> varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow
> a
> power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution.
> Power laws appear widely in physics, biology, earth and planetary
> sciences,
> economics and finance, computer science, demography and the social
> sciences. For instance, the distributions of the sizes of cities,
> earthquakes, forest. res, solar flares, moon craters and people's personal
> fortunes all appear to follow power laws. The origin of power-law
> behaviour
> has been a topic of debate in the scientific community for more than a
> century. Here we review some of the empirical evidence for the existence
> of
> power-law forms and the theories proposed to explain them.
>
>
> Addresses: Newman MEJ (reprint author), Univ Michigan, Dept Phys, Ann
> Arbor, MI 48109 USA
> Univ Michigan, Dept Phys, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
> Univ Michigan, Ctr Study Complex Syst, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
>
> E-mail Addresses: mejn at umich.edu
>
> Publisher: TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 4 PARK SQUARE, MILTON PARK, ABINGDON OX14
> 4RN, OXON, ENGLAND
> Subject Category: PHYSICS, MULTIDISCIPLINARY
> IDS Number: 958FQ
>
> ISSN: 0010-7514