Authorship Dynamics and Lotka’s Law Applicability in the Realm of Archaeology

Abstract

This research seeks to explore authorship trends, author productivity, and the applicability of Lotka’s law within the Archaeology discipline from 2018 to 2022. The primary goal of this research is to determine author productivity and evaluate the application of Lotka’s law, including goodness-of-fit, using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) and Chi-Square tests. Utilising the various quantitative methodologies (like- The K-S test and Chi-Square test), this study fulfils its objectives by analysing global research output in the field of Archaeology. The extraction of data is facilitated through advanced search techniques within the Web of Science Core Collection Database. 8980 authors contributed 3742 research articles of which 7095 (79.01 %) authors contributed only one research article, 1207 (13.44 %) authored two articles, and so on. The study’s outcomes revealed the exponent ‘n’ (-3.337), constant ‘c’ (0.873), and critical value ‘cv’ (0.035) as significant metrics within the examined context. The observed number of authors is 8,980, while the expected number is 11,212. The Dmax value is 15.73 noted in the cumulative frequency comparison between the observed and expected values and the chi-square (X2) value in this dataset is 1434.302. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) and Chi-Square tests were used to validate the applicability of Lotka’s Law to the dataset. However, both goodness-of-fit tests rejected the hypothesis, after applying Lotka’s law in the selected data set.