Garfield's Law of Concentration

Garfield's Law of Concentration is the bibliometric principle that the bulk of the significant scientific literature is concentrated in a relatively small, largely multidisciplinary core of journals. Formulated by Eugene Garfield — founder of the Science Citation Index — and presented in his 1972 Science paper 'Citation analysis as a tool in journal evaluation', the law observes that when journals are ranked by how often they are cited, a core of perhaps 500 to 1,000 journals accounts for the overwhelming majority of all citations across all fields. Garfield framed it as a generalization and corollary of Bradford's earlier law of scattering: the long tail of any one discipline's literature is in large part composed of the cores of other disciplines, so a single multidisciplinary core covers science as a whole. The law underpins the rationale for selective, citation-based journal indexing.