Terra sebv s acta mvsei sabesiensi s

Bibliometric Analysis in Historiographical Studies 

 

119

characterise the rate of development of a particular scientific field based on 

the period taken for the annual information flow to double. This made it 

possible,  inter alia, to identify disciplines with accelerated development, 

those with an average rate of development, those developing at a slow pace 

(with a doubling period exceeding 20 years) and decaying disciplines 

(characterized by a decrease in the volume of documents produced).

5

 

In the 1960s, scientists R. Barton and R. Kebler derived a consistent 

pattern according to which ideas of major importance to society are 

concentrated in a certain time interval. For academic documentation, this 

interval was on average equal to half the period of the formation of 

academic concepts in the social system, i.e. approximately 19 years. Of 

course, the rate of obsolescence depends on the actual academic area, the 

specific field and the academic direction.

6

 

In 1948, English chemist and documentalist S. Bradford identified the 

phenomenon of information scattering, which he described in terms of 

distribution. Bradford’s distribution shows a dependency between the 

number of articles on a specific subject in a journal and its rank amongst 

other journals in terms of relevance to that particular field, characterised by 

decreasing productivity of articles on that specific subject. According to this 

law, if we take as a unit the aggregate (cumulation) of all publications on any 

narrow field, about one-third of the articles are found in the small number 

of specialised journals (core). The second third of the publications on this 

subject are contained in a fairly large number (first zone) of thematically 

related journals. The final third of publications are “scattered” in journals, 

thematically unrelated to this area (second zone). This distribution is 

expressed in Bradford’s Law: 

 

p0: p1: p2 = 1: n: n

2

 

 

where p0, p1, p2 respectively indicate the core and subsequent zones, whilst 

n represents the number of journals in each zone, depending on their 

relevance to the subject area. Bradford found that if the core consisted of 

10 journals covering 500 articles on the topic, the first zone had 500 articles 

across 50 less relevant journals, and in the second zone, 500 articles were 

scattered across 250 journals on diverse subjects, making n = 5.

7

 

As the contemporary bibliography expert A. S. Sokolov remarked, 

this statistical formula does not so much express a dependency as a 

tendency, itself dependent upon many factors (area, subject, type of 

                                                 

5 

Ivanov 2003, p. 366. 

6

 Efimov 1978, p. 55. 

7

 Sokolov 2008, p. 18. 

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A. A. Pronin 

 

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document, etc.). Therefore, it is more accurate to talk about Bradford’s 

consistent pattern, rather than law.

8

 

Bradford’s consistent pattern and other research on documentary 

methods opened a new and promising direction in the science of 

informatics, which came out of scientometrics and is now called 

bibliometrics (A. V. Sokolov considers the concepts of scientometrics, 

informetrics and bibliometrics as identical under present-day conditions).

9

 

The term bibliometrics was introduced in 1969 by British scientist Alan 

Pritchard, extending the scope of statistical bibliography. Bibliometrics 

arose from the creation of bibliographic databases, thanks to the 

development of information technology. Bibliometrics and scientometrics 

are part of the wider concept of informetrics, that is, the discipline which 

deals with quantitative measurements of how information is stored and 

used.

10

 

In the 1960s, the Soviet information scientists L. S. Kozachkov, L. A. 

Hursin and V. I. Gorkova, through studying the distribution of publications 

in periodicals, clarified and expanded the initial understanding of Bradford’s 

distribution. The essence of these revisions was to show that with 

documentary flows that are in an ordered state, there is in fact no scattering 

phenomenon and the concentration is relevant to the subject area of 

information in a particular group of documentary sources. Kozachkov and 

Hursin refined the mathematical formulation of Bradford’s consistent 

pattern and obtained a better correspondence between theoretically 

predicted distributions and practical findings.

11

 In 1971, at the Union 

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (UISTI),

12

 Gorkova 

defended her doctoral thesis on System-structural Studies of Documentary 

Information Flow, in which she proposed new mathematical models and 

stated, regarding the scattering concentration law, that documentary 

information flows have two properties: they concentrate nuclear elements 

and dissipate non-nuclear components.

13

 

Computer-tested statistical approaches to the study of documentary 

flows were developed during the period 1960-1980 and were used 

                                                 

8 

Ibid. 

9 

Ibid., p. 18-19. 

10

 Gorkova 1988. 

11

 Kozachkov 1973, p. 56-57. 

12

 UISTI - Russian (formerly Union) Institute for Scientific and Technical Information of 

Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. 

13

 Sokolov 2008, p. 19. 

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