Testing the Applicability of Lotka’s Law, Bradford’s Law, and Zipf’s Law on Gastritis Research Output

Abstract

This study investigates the applicability of the fundamental bibliometric laws-Lotka’s Law, Bradford’s Law, and Zipf’s Law-within the domain of Gastritis research. Utilising data from the Web of Science Core Collection, a total of 19,856 records on Gastritis research were analysed using various scientometric tools and statistical tests.Lotka’s Law, which models author productivity, was tested through the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test and the Chi-Square test which confirmed significant discrepancies between the observed and expected distributions of publications. Bradford’s Law, applied to journal productivity and article scattering, revealed a deviation from the anticipated 1:α:α² ratio. Zipf’s Law was validated through an analysis of the most frequently used terms and the results demonstrated an inverse relationship between rank and frequency, supporting the applicability of Zipf’s Law to the Gastritis research corpus.