Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2014;98(1):173-184.
doi: 10.1007/s11192-013-1030-8. Epub 2013 May 21.

Benford's Law and articles of scientific journals: comparison of JCR® and Scopus data

Affiliations

Benford's Law and articles of scientific journals: comparison of JCR® and Scopus data

Alexandre Donizeti Alves et al. Scientometrics. 2014.

Abstract

Benford's Law is a logarithmic probability distribution function used to predict the distribution of the first significant digits in numerical data. This paper presents the results of a study of the distribution of the first significant digits of the number of articles published of journals indexed in the JCR® Sciences and Social Sciences Editions from 2007 to 2011. The data of these journals were also analyzed by the country of origin and the journal's category. Results considering the number of articles published informed by Scopus are also presented. Comparing the results we observe that there is a significant difference in the data informed in the two databases.

Keywords: Articles; Benford’s Law; JCR®; Scopus.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Beber B, Scacco A. What the numbers say: A digit-based test for election fraud. Political Analysis. 2012;20(2):211–234. doi: 10.1093/pan/mps003. - DOI
    1. Benford F. The law of anomalous numbers. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 1938;78(4):551–572.
    1. Campanario JM, Coslado MA. Benford’s law and citations, articles and impact factors of scientific journals. Scientometrics. 2011;88(2):421–432. doi: 10.1007/s11192-011-0387-9. - DOI
    1. Clippe P, Ausloos M. Benford’s law and Theil transform of financial data. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. 2012;391(24):6556–6567. doi: 10.1016/j.physa.2012.07.063. - DOI
    1. Egghe L, Guns R. Applications of the generalized law of Benford to informetric data. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 2012;63(8):1662–1665. doi: 10.1002/asi.22690. - DOI

LinkOut - more resources