Patterns of Productivity in the Finance Literature: A Study of the Bibliometric Distributions

This study finds a bibliometric regularity in the finance literature that the number of authors publishing n papers is about $1/n^c$ of those publishing one paper. We find that the finance literature conforms very well to the inverse square law $(c=2)$ if data are taken from a large collection of journals. When applied to individual finance journals, we find that values of c range from 1.95 to 3.26. We also find that top-rated journals have higher concentrations among their contributors. This implies that the phenomenon “success breeds success” is more common in higher quality publications.