Validity of Lotka’s Law in Geology Literature

The present paper analyzes the pattern of authorship and various collaboration measures in the field of Geology literature during 1989-2020. The Web of Science database was used to download a total of 19,102 papers. These papers were published in the form of articles, reviews, and conference proceeding papers during 1989-2020. Collaborative measures such as degree of collaboration (DC), Collaborative Coefficient (CC), Collaboration Index (CI), and Co-Authorship Index (CAI) were analyzed for four blocks of 8 years each. Lotka’s law was applied to 20,556 authors who published 9,009 papers during Block 4 (2013-2020) and verified using the K-S test at the 5% significance level. On applying the collaborative measures, the values of DC and CC are found to follow an increasing trend. The average value of DC (0.88) and CC (0.59) implies high collaboration among Geologists. The mean value of CI (3.71) denotes collaboration between 3-4 authors per paper. The values of CAI suggest a drastic increase in mega-authorship. The paper also examines Lotka’s law of author productivity for the period of 8 years (2013-2020), and its confirmation using the K-S test. Lotka’s Law is also known as Lotka’s Inverse Power Law when the value of n is other than 2 . The value of Dmax (0.0513) was found to be greater than the critical value Dc.v.(0.0095) at the 5% level of significance, and hence the author’s productivity failed to follow Lotka’s Law. Based on the productivity of authors, Prof. M. Santosh from China University of Geosciences was ranked first, followed by T.N. Singh from IIT Bombay.