A proposal to define a core of a scientific subject: A definition using concentration and fuzzy sets

Abstract

Determining the core of a field's literature, i.e. its 'most important' sources, has been and still is an important problem in bibliometrics. In this article an exact definition of a core of a bibliography or a conglomerate is presented. The main ingredients for this definition are: fuzzy set theory, Lorenz curves and concentration measures. If one prefers a strict delineation, the fuzzy core can easily be defuzzified. The method we propose does not depend on the subjective notion of 'importance'. It is, moreover, completely reproducible. The method and the resulting core is also independent of the mathematical function (Lotka, Zipf, Bradford, etc.) that may be used to describe the relation between the set of sources and that of items.