Classical Laws of Informatrics : An Overview

Classical laws of bibliometrics – Bradford’s law, Lotka’s and Zipf’s law – are discussed, with emphasis on to law of scattering and inverse square law of scientific productivity. Two different approaches to bibliometric distributions – size and rank frequency approaches, characteristics of bibliometric distributions are discusse

Journal Productivity in Fishery Science an informetric analysis

Knowledge is a human resource which has the ability to consolidate the valuable results of human thinking and civilization through different times. It is the totality of understanding of nature and its features for improved quality of life of human society. Because of this, knowledge has been increasing in volume, dimension and directions. The term ‘information’ and 'knowledge' are often used as if they are interchangeable. Information is ‘potential knowledge‘ which is converted into knowledge by the integration of memory of human beings. In modern times there is a confusion on knowledge usage. Therefore an understanding of the concept ‘knowledge’ is needed for formulation of strategies in information science

What is a complex innovation system?

Innovation systems are sometimes referred to as complex systems, something that is intuitively understood but poorly defined. A complex system dynamically evolves in non-linear ways giving it unique properties that distinguish it from other systems. In particular, a common signature of complex systems is scale-invariant emergent properties. A scale-invariant property can be identified because it is solely described by a power law function, f(x) = kxα, where the exponent, α, is a measure of scale-invariance. The focus of this paper is to describe and illustrate that innovation systems have properties of a complex adaptive system. In particular scale-invariant emergent properties indicative of their complex nature that can be quantified and used to inform public policy. The global research system is an example of an innovation system. Peer-reviewed publications containing knowledge are a characteristic output. Citations or references to these articles are an indirect measure of the impact the knowledge has on the research community. Peer-reviewed papers indexed in Scopus and in the Web of Science were used as data sources to produce measures of sizes and impact. These measures are used to illustrate how scale-invariant properties can be identified and quantified. It is demonstrated that the distribution of impact has a reasonable likelihood of being scale-invariant with scaling exponents that tended toward a value of less than 3.0 with the passage of time and decreasing group sizes. Scale-invariant correlations are shown between the evolution of impact and size with time and between field impact and sizes at points in time. The recursive or self-similar nature of scale-invariance suggests that any smaller innovation system within the global research system is likely to be complex with scale-invariant properties too

Statistical studies of patents literature

This study has been undertaken to determine what pseudo-proprietary information and patenting activity statistics could be derived from an online patents database. To achieve this, a thorough investigation uas made of patenting in the field of an important group of beta-lactam antibiotics, the. Cephalosporins. Patents data was retrieved from the World Patents Index online files of Derwent Publications Limited, and the bibliographic details of each patent application retrieved analysed according to numbers of patents per patentee, priority and publication dates, types of patents, etc. A review of technological advances in this subject was conducted, demonstrating the value of patents literature for such purposes. The relationship between sales volumes and patenting activity for Cephalosporins patentees has been investigated and found to show a. significant correlation between these parameters. As an extension, the USA patenting and sales activity for the leading USA Industrial Corporations (the 1981 Fortune 500) was studied; overall a high correlation was exhibited, but there were notable differences. between different industries. A number of bibliometric studies have been undertaken with a variety of patents data. for a number of techhologies. These studies include the application of Bradford-Zipf plots, other productivity studies and Vector Analysis to patents. Whilst previous studies on journal literature have investigated the applicability of frequency distributions as measures of author productivity, this study has for the first time applied Lotka's Law, Price's Pareto-type Distribution, Simon-Yule Distribution, Shockley's Lognormal Distribution, Borel-Tanner Distribution, Williams Geometric Series, Fisher's Logarithmic Series and the Negative Binomial Distribution to patents data. Theoretical distributions were ascertained using a series of microcomputer programs written in BASIC programming' language. The results indicate that of the distributions investigated, the Negative Binomial most closely fits the observed data when goodness-offit is measured by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test