Patterns of Productivity in the Finance Literature: A Study of the Bibliometric Distributions

This study finds a bibliometric regularity in the finance literature that the number of authors publishing n papers is about 1/n^c of those publishing one paper. We find that the finance literature conforms very well to the inverse square law (c = 2) if data are taken from a large collection of journals. When applied to individual finance journals, we find that values of c range from 1.95 to 3.26. We also find that top‐rated journals have higher concentrations among their contributors. This implies that the phenomenon “success breeds success” is more common in higher quality publications. 1990 The American Finance Association