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Permalink Reply by Jayshree Dave on February 9, 2011 at 17:31

Bradford's Law serves as a general guideline to librarians in determining the number of core journals in any given field. It states that journals in a single field can be divided into three parts, each containing the same number of articles: 1) a core of journals on the subject, relatively few in number, that produces approximately one-third of all the articles, 2) a second zone, containing the same number of articles as the first, but a greater number of journals, and 3) a third zone, containing the same number of articles as the second, but a still greater number of journals. The mathematical relationship of the number of journals in the core to the first zone is a constant n and to the second zone the relationship is n². Bradford expressed this relationship as 1:n:n². Bradford formulated his law after studying a bibliography of geophysics, covering 326 journals in the field. He discovered that 9 journals contained 429 articles, 59 contained 499 articles, and 258 contained 404 articles. So it took 9 journals to contribute one-third of the articles, 5 times 9, or 45, to produce the next third, and 5 times 5 times 9, or 225, to produce the last third. As may be seen, Bradford's Law is not statistically accurate, strictly speaking. But it is still commonly used as a general rule of thumb (Potter 1988).

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Permalink Reply by Mamta Verma on February 9, 2011 at 18:10

Please find the attached link. It may be useful for you

Attachments:

• Bradford's Law.ppt, 90 KB

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Permalink Reply by Dr. Badan Barman on February 9, 2011 at 21:10

Dear Jaison,

I dont know why you post such type of topic for discussion. You can make a search over Google or Wikipedia and get the answer of these types of questions. So is there any need of posting such type of topics for discussion over LIS Links forum? I am waiting for your response.

 

One more thing. In discussion, you mostly use UPPER CASE letter and everytime I have to convert it to sentence case. Please try to avoid the use of UPPER CASE in the title as well as in the main content of the discussion forum.

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