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Lotka’s law for the Brazilian scientific output published in journals

Abstract:

Lotka’s law is a power law for the frequency of scholarly publications. We show that Lotka’s law cannot be dismissed after considering a massive sample of the number of publications of Brazilian researchers in journals listed on the SCImago Journal Rank and the Journal Citation Reports. For the SCImago Journal Rank, we found a power law with the Pareto exponent of 0.4 beyond the threshold of 50 papers. This means computing the ‘average number of publications’ of either a researcher or a discipline is of no practical significance.