Lotka's law and productivity patterns of entomological research in Nigeria for the period, 1900–1973

Abstract

A bibliography of entomological research in Nigeria, 1900–1973 totally 1720 publications was analysed to study the author productivity patterns and to test the applicability of Lotka's law for the obtained distributions. Four different files were generated, one for the publications of all the authors, second for the publications by first authors, third for single authors and fourth for coauthors. Lotka's law in its original form as inverse square law does not apply to any of the four data sets. However, it does apply in its generalised form with the calculated values of characteristic exponent α. The values of α were found to be 1.9, 1.8, 2.2 and 2.4 for the four different data sets. K-S statistical test was aplied to test the applicability of generalised form of Lotka's law. The maximum difference in the observed and estimated values of the proportions of authors was found to be highly insignificant at 0.01 level of significance in each of the four cases.