An examination of lotka’s law of authorship productivity in the field of neurosciences

Lotkas law of Scientific Productivity is Bibliometric study, it has been used to calculate the number of authors against the number of publications contributed by the authors was plotted on a logarithmic scale. The points were closely distributed around the straight line having a slope of almost 2. The present study tests the conformity of Lotka's law for authorship distribution in the field of neuroscience using the web of science core collection database. There are 57640 publications contributed by 132481 authors. Lotka’s law was tested by with help methods given by Pao and Maximum Likelihood method as reported by Nicholls. Later the data was organized according to authorship pattern with the help of MS Excel. The value of c and exponent n is calculated with help of collie and Pao formula. It is observed that the number of authors publishing n papers was 1/n2 of those publishing one paper. The present study is almost following the same pattern. Hence, it can be concluded that Lotka’s law of Author productivity is well fitted/followed in the field of Neuroscience.