A bibliometric analysis of productivity patterns of biomedical authors of Nigeria during 1967-2002

Summary

Bibliographic data on biomedical literature of Nigeria drawn from articles listed in Medline covering the period 1967-2002, and numbering 6820 were analysed to study the pattern of productivity of various author categories using Lotka's law. The total of 2184 authors who wrote the papers was divided into four different files, namely all authors, first authors, non-collaborative authors and co-authors. We hypothesized that the productivity patterns of each of the categories of authors differed from Lotka's inverse power law. The results showed that only the co-author category differed from the inverse power version of the law, while the other categories did not, although they yielded various exponents.