Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are the cornerstones of evidence-based medicine and inform treatment, diagnosis, or prevention of individual patients as well as policy decisions in health care. Statistical methods for the meta-analysis of intervention studies are well established today. Meta-analysis for diagnostic accuracy trials has also…

Examines significant studies, published from 1934 through 1987, which have contributed to an understanding of three central concerns in the specialty associated with Bradford's law: the appropriate formulation for Bradford's law, the parameters of the Bradford distribution, and the Bradford distribution's relationships to other distributions. (79…

Explains two basic approaches to bibliometric models (frequency-size, frequency-rank); cites 28 models; and analyzes three models--Price, Bookstein, and Brookes--by considering their internal properties, interrelationships, and generality. Validity of the generalizations is noted. Appendices include 32 references and list of 28 additional…

Examines the properties of bibliometric distributions (application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and other written communications) in a nontechnical manner, covering similarities of the Lotka, Bradford, and Zipf distributions, the relationship between empirical laws and theories, and bibliometric concepts and theory construction.…

Explains Zipf's Law of Vocabulary Distribution (i.e., relationship between frequency of a word in a corpus and its rank), noting the discovery of the law, alternative forms, and literature relating to the search for a rationale for Zipf's Law. Thirty-eight references are cited. (EJS)

Reviews literature relating to Bradford's Law of Scatter, which groups journals and articles to identify number of periodicals relevant to particular subject, and notes the gap between theoretical and empirical studies, i.e., no relationship has been found between variables which characterize empirical situations and theoretical models. Thirteen…

Discusses the literature that has become associated with Lotka's Law of Scientific Productivity (a general theoretical estimate of author productivity in the sciences) and attempts to identify the important factors of Lotka's original methodology that should be considered when attempting to test applicability of Lotka's Law. Forty-seven references…

Examines the citation patterns for scientific journal articles and discusses reasons for the skewed distributions of article citedness. Topics discussed include the article age distribution; citations to articles from single journals; citedness of articles written by the same author; possible model distributions of citedness; and citedness as an…

Illustrates that the Poisson-lognormal model provides good fits to a diverse set of distributions commonly studied in bibliometrics and scientometrics. Topics discussed include applications to the empirical data sets related to the laws of Lotka, Bradford, and Zipf; causal processes that could generate lognormal distributions; and implications for…

An evolved form of the Edwards and Beckworth (1989) model for probability selection for Scholastic Achievement Test takers using truncated normal distributions is presented. It is shown that the arguments of Holland and Wainer are not sufficient to reject this model. (SLD)