Purpose

This study aims to analyze the productivity patterns of authors using law literature indexed in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) from 2016 to 2020 based on Lotka’s law. Lotka’s law of scientific productivity provides a platform for studying the variation between the actual and expected authors’ productivity patterns in a subject area over a specified period.

Design/methodology/approach

This study covers 3,334 open access journal articles in law subject. The law journals are subdivided into two basic divisions, namely, public law and private law. This paper focuses on the journal-wise distribution of publications, subject-wise distribution of publications, annual growth rate (AGR) as well as compound AGR and applicability of Lotka’s law in both public and private law by applying the least square method followed by Pao and doing the K-S goodness-of-fit test. Student’s t-test and chi-square test have been applied to verify the significant difference between the public law and the private law literature.

Findings

There is no significant difference between the public law and private law publications on their publications per issue. The chi-square test showed that there is no significant difference between the year-wise publications in public law and private law. The authorship productivity in public law differs from the distribution of Lotka’s inverse square law, whereas it follows Lotka’s law in the case of private law.

Research limitations/implications

This study is based on the articles published in open access English language journals which are indexed in the DOAJ.

Originality/value

This study will be useful to know the authorship productivity pattern of law literature for both public and private law individually.

中文翻译：

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洛特卡定律与法学学科研究的作者生产力模式

目的

本研究旨在根据 Lotka 定律，使用 2016 年至 2020 年开放存取期刊目录 (DOAJ) 中索引的法律文献来分析作者的生产力模式。Lotka 的科学生产力定律提供了一个平台，用于研究特定时期内某一学科领域的实际作者和预期作者的生产力模式之间的差异。

设计/方法/方法

这项研究涵盖了 3,334 篇法律学科的开放获取期刊文章。法律期刊被细分为两个基本部门，即公法和私法。本文重点关注出版物的期刊分布、出版物的主题分布、年增长率 (AGR) 以及复合 AGR 以及 Lotka 定律在公法和私法中的适用性，采用 Pao 的最小二乘法并进行 KS 拟合优度检验。学生t检验和卡方检验已用于验证公法和私法文献之间的显着差异。

发现

公法和私法出版物在每期出版物上没有显着差异。卡方检验表明，公法和私法的年度出版物之间没有显着差异。公法中的作者身份生产力不同于洛特卡平方反比法的分布，而私法则遵循洛特卡法则。

研究限制/影响

本研究基于在 DOAJ 中收录的开放获取英语期刊上发表的文章。

原创性/价值

本研究将有助于分别了解公法和私法的法律文献的作者身份生产力模式。