Lack of standardisation in informetric research. Comments on "Power laws of research output. Evidence for journals of economics" by Matthias Sutter and Martin G. Kocher

Abstract

Lack of standard procedures hinders progress in scientometric and bibliometric research. Provoked by a recent publication in the journal Scientometrics, we consider in particular the problem of how to handle - in a standardised way - data that, by and large, follow a Lotka, Zipf or Mandelbrot distribution.