ARE OBSOLESCENCE AND SCATTERING RELATED?

Journal of DocumentationPublished 1 March 1972Open access

Michael K. Buckland

Citations24

TL;DR

The extent to which the use of material tends to be concentrated in a few titles is treated and Bradford's Law of scattering is treated.

Abstract

Considerable attention has been paid, in this journal and elsewhere, to each of two aspects of the use of literature. One of these is the relative decrease in use of material as it ages (‘obsolescence’) which has been discussed by Brookes and many others. The other aspect is the extent to which the use of material tends to be concentrated in a few titles (‘Bradford's Law of scattering’), which has been treated by Bradford, Leimkuhler, Brookes, and Fairthorne.

Keywords

Computer ScienceEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Journal of DocumentationEmpirical Hyperbolic Distributions (Bradford‐Zipf‐Mandelbrot) for Bibliometric Description and Prediction

237 Citations1969R. A. Fairthorne

This paper builds on the work of Buckland and Hindle regarding statistical distribution as applied to the field of bibliometrics, particularly the use of empirical laws, and discusses the characteristics of hyperbolic distributions and the Bradford distribution.

Journal of DocumentationTHE BRADFORD DISTRIBUTION

194 Citations1967Ferdinand F. Leimkuhler

The model is derived from S. C. Bradford's ‘law of scattering’ and is called the Bradford Distribution and is used to predict the reference yield of abstracting journals in a search for thermophysical property data.

Journal of DocumentationTHE DERIVATION AND APPLICATION OF THE BRADFORD‐ZIPF DISTRIBUTION

139 Citations1968B. C. Brookes

The present paper shows that the Bradford distribution is closely related to the Zipf distribution, which requires data on only the most productive journals, is mathematically simple and amenable to graphical methods if a proposed idea of the ‘completeness’ of a search is accepted.

Journal of DocumentationTHE GROWTH, UTILITY, AND OBSOLESCENCE OF SCIENTIFIC PERIODICAL LITERATURE

87 Citations1970B. C. Brookes

The paper shows that Line's technique for correcting the ‘apparent’ half‐life is both questionable and impractical, and that a further factor—the growth of the number of contributors—needs to be allowed for in Vickery's analysis.

NatureOptimum P% Library of Scientific Periodicals

37 Citations1971B. C. Brookes

A quantitative method is described for finding the optimum percentage of periodicals for a library in a given field, apparently counterbalanced by the disappearance of the old.

Journal of DocumentationJOURNAL USAGE VERSUS AGE OF JOURNAL

31 Citations1963Penny Cole

In this present paper a relationship between usage and age of journal is established and the application of this relationship to some library planning problems is illustrated.