Document (#37377)

Author

Egghe, L.
Guns, R.

Title

Applications of the generalized law of Benford to informetric data

Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 63(2012) no.8, S.1662-1665

Year

2012

Series

Brief communication

Abstract

In a previous work (Egghe, 2011), the first author showed that Benford's law (describing the logarithmic distribution of the numbers 1, 2, ... , 9 as first digits of data in decimal form) is related to the classical law of Zipf with exponent 1. The work of Campanario and Coslado (2011), however, shows that Benford's law does not always fit practical data in a statistical sense. In this article, we use a generalization of Benford's law related to the general law of Zipf with exponent ? > 0. Using data from Campanario and Coslado, we apply nonlinear least squares to determine the optimal ? and show that this generalized law of Benford fits the data better than the classical law of Benford.

Theme

Informetrie

Object

Zipf-Gesetz
Benford-Gesetz

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