Abstract
The influence of various factors upon the shape of Bradford's bibliograph was assessed through an examination of 16 bibliographies, of which ten were comprehensive. We obtained a curvature score for each bibliograph plotted in a standard landscape format so as to permit comparison; we found that the amount of concave up curvature (“convexity”): (a) is negatively correlated with a bibliography's overall publication density; (b) depends on the status (“technical” vs. “nontechnical”) of the disciplinary source of a bibliography, with technical disciplines showing less convexity; and (c) is complexly affected by the historical changes in the discipline. Findings are discussed in the context of questions about the graphical formulation of Bradford's Law.
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Other writers have assumed that Bradford's verbal law was the first. See p. 125 ofE. A. Wilkinson, The ambiguity of Bradford's law,Journal of Documentation, 28 (1972) 122–130.
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The procedure does not constitute an assertion that the observed data-set is best described as convex (or concave), for the apparent form may clearly be S-shaped. The procedure only asumes that the display includes a quadratic “trend” whose direction and magnitude can be indexed by the curvature score: SeeD. A. Grant, Analysis of variance tests in the analysis and comparison of curves,Psychological Bulletin, 53 (1956) 141–154. Other measures of curvature are possible, and a calculus-based measure was suggested by a reviewer of an earlier version of this paper: see pp. 486–492 ofC. H. Edwards, Jr., D. E. Penney,Calculus and Analytic Geometry, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1982. We examined alternative measures of curvature, scrutinizing their distributional properties and correlation with one another and with some of the bibliographic features we examine in this article.Appendix 2 presents results from our examination, results that warrant our use of the measure of curvature that we describe in the current article.
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Coleman, S.R. Disciplinary variables that affect the shape of Bradford's bibliograph. Scientometrics 29, 59–81 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02018384
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02018384