Bradford's Law: Theory, Empiricism and the Gaps Between

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Reexamining the role of conference papers in scholarly communication

In the most widely accepted model of the growth of scien-tific literature, papers presented at conferences are seen as precursors leading to the creation of journal articles. A sample of papers presented at an annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science led to journal ar-ticles at a rate much lower than would be expected from studies of other disciplines. On the other hand, a sample of articles from the Journal of the America / Society for Infor-mation Science had rates of follow-up publication similar to values reported in the literature. This suggests that it is not the case that information science as a discipline has different publication patterns from other scholarly areas. A more complex model of the growth of scientific literature is proposed. Among the features of this model are recogni-tion that many new findings can be conveyed with rela-tively small amounts of information. A view that in complex systems novelty may not be as important as generalizabil-ity. And the emergence of new forms of dissemination in-cluding electronic communication, self-publishing, and “group monographs.

Random Sampling: A Tool for Library Research

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