Estimation of Zipf parameters

✍ Scribed by Nicholls, Paul Travis

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1987
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 303 KB
• Volume: 38
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0002-8231
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(198711)38:6<443::aid-asi4>3.0.co;2-e

✦ Synopsis

The two-parameter size-frequency form of the Zipf distribution is defined as

When g(x) represents the number of researchers expected to make x published contributions to a subject field, we have the generalized Lotka model of author productivity [ 11. See Chen and Leimkuhler [2] for an alternative formulation which explicitly takes account of the fact that, for empirical datasets, it is unrealistic to assume that the values of x will run cufltinuously from 1 to x,,. Much of the mystery surrounding the empirical validity of the Lotka hypothesis is attributable to methodological inconsistencies in the validity studies that have appeared [3]. Recently, standard procedures have been proposed for such validity tests [4,5]. Parameter estimation is a central feature of any such procedure, and is of crucial importance to the resulting goodness-of-fit.