The Maturing Of Scientometrics And Informetrics Author: Eugene Garfield
In the early 1900s, scientists and librarians were already conscious of the exponential growth of the research literature. Small-scale bibliometric analyses--studies of papers, references, and authors--had been done at the turn of the century. A few classics, like Alfred J. Lotka's 1926 paper on author productivity (Journal of the Washington Academy of Science, 16:217-23) and the 1927 citation ranking of chemical journals by P.L.K. Gross and E.M. Gross (Science, 66:385-9), come to mind as progenitors of this field of research.
In 1934, Samuel C. Bradford expounded his law of scattering to describe how the literature on a given subject is distributed in journals (Engineering, 137:85-6). Simply put, the law states that in comprehensively searching on any subject or discipline, a small group of core journals always accounts for a substantial portion (one-third) of the articles. A second, larger group of journals ...
