An exact, discrete formulation of Bradford's law describing the distribution of articles in journals is derived by showing that Bradford's law is a special case of the Zipf‐Mandelbrot ‘rank frequency’ law. A relatively simple method is presented for fitting the model to empirical data and...

The distribution of references in a collection of pertinent source documents can be described and predicted by the relation where the parameter ß is related to the subject field and the completeness of the collection. The model is used to predict the reference yield of abstracting journals in a...