Author inflation leads to a breakdown of Lotka's law

Abstract

It is empirically shown that, even using the normal or total counting procedure, Lotka's law breaks down when articles with a large, i.e., more than hundred, number of authors are included in the bibliography, The explanation of this phenomenon is that the conditions for an application of the basic success-breeds-success model are not fulfilled any more. Studying articles with many authors means dealing with items (the articles) having multiple sources (the authors), hence Egghe's generalized success-breeds-success model, leading to not necessarily decreasing distributions, explains the observed irregularities.