Comparer des méthodes

	Lois bibliométriques : Lois de Lotka, de Bradford et de Zipf	Analyse par couplage bibliographique
Domaine	Bibliométrie	Bibliométrie
Famille	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Année d'origine	1926–1949	1963
Auteur d'origine	Alfred J. Lotka, Samuel C. Bradford, George K. Zipf	Melvin M. Kessler
Type	Concept	Method
Source fondatrice	Lotka, A. J. (1926). The frequency distribution of scientific productivity. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, 16(12), 317–323.	Kessler, M. M. (1963). Bibliographic coupling between scientific papers. American Documentation, 14(3), 123–131.
Alias	bibliometric distributions, productivity laws, frequency laws, information science laws	document coupling, bibliographic similarity
Apparentées	3	5
Résumé	Three foundational empirical laws describe the structure and distribution of scientific information: Lotka's Law characterizes author productivity (most authors publish few papers; a few publish many), Bradford's Law describes journal concentration (a small number of core journals contain the majority of papers on a topic), and Zipf's Law models word and term frequency (word frequency inversely proportional to its rank). These regularities, discovered in the mid-20th century, are remarkably robust across disciplines and have become essential tools for understanding research productivity, organizing information resources, and designing search strategies.	Bibliographic coupling is a method that identifies intellectual relationships between documents by measuring their shared references. Two papers are considered 'coupled' when they cite the same sources, indicating they address related research questions or draw from the same conceptual foundations. Introduced by Kessler in 1963, this approach enables researchers to map knowledge domains and discover thematically similar publications without relying on subject cataloging or keywords.