bibliometrix (version 2.3.2)

bradford: Bradford's law

Description

It estimates and draws the Bradford's law source distribution.

Usage

bradford(M)

Arguments

M

is a bibliographic dataframe.

Value

The function bradford returns a list containing the following objects:

table

a dataframe with the source distribution partitioned in the three zones

Details

Bradford's law is a pattern first described by (Samuel C. Bradford, 1934) that estimates the exponentially diminishing returns of searching for references in science journals.

One formulation is that if journals in a field are sorted by number of articles into three groups, each with about one-third of all articles, then the number of journals in each group will be proportional to 1:n:n2.

Reference: Bradford, S. C. (1934). Sources of information on specific subjects. Engineering, 137, 85-86.

See Also

biblioAnalysis function for bibliometric analysis

summary method for class 'bibliometrix'

Examples

# NOT RUN {
# D <- readFiles('http://www.bibliometrix.org/datasets/bibliometrics_articles.txt')

# M <- convert2df(file = D, dbsource = "isi", format = "bibtex")

# BR <- bradford(M)

# }