14 Sep 2004
CS 5244 Bibliometrics
7
Zipf-Yule-Pareto Law
Pn ≈ 1/na
where Pn is the frequency of occurrence of the nth ranked item and a ≈ 1.
The probability of
occurrence of a value of some variable starts high and tapers off. Thus, a few values occur
very often while many others
occur rarely.
‘Pareto for land ownership in the 1800s
‘Zipf for word frequency
‘Also known as the 80/20 rule and as Zipf-Mandelbrot
‘Used to measure of citings per paper:
# of papers cited n times is about 1/na of those being cited once, where a ≈ 1