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Open source software development and Lotka's Law: Bibliometric patterns in programming

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  • Gregory B. Newby
  • Jane Greenberg
  • Paul Jones

Abstract

This research applies Lotka's Law to metadata on open source software development. Lotka's Law predicts the proportion of authors at different levels of productivity. Open source software development harnesses the creativity of thousands of programmers worldwide, is important to the progress of the Internet and many other computing environments, and yet has not been widely researched. We examine metadata from the Linux Software Map (LSM), which documents many open source projects, and Sourceforge, one of the largest resources for open source developers. Authoring patterns found are comparable to prior studies of Lotka's Law for scientific and scholarly publishing. Lotka's Law was found to be effective in understanding software development productivity patterns, and offer promise in predicting aggregate behavior of open source developers.

Suggested Citation

  • Gregory B. Newby & Jane Greenberg & Paul Jones, 2003. "Open source software development and Lotka's Law: Bibliometric patterns in programming," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 54(2), pages 169-178, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:54:y:2003:i:2:p:169-178
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.10177
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    Cited by:

    1. Jordi Ardanuy & Cristóbal Urbano & Lluís Quintana, 2009. "A citation analysis of Catalan literary studies (1974–2003): Towards a bibliometrics of humanities studies in minority languages," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 81(2), pages 347-366, November.
    2. Marija Petek, 2008. "Personal name headings in COBIB: Testing Lotka’s Law," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 75(1), pages 175-188, April.
    3. Mihail Cocosila & Alexander Serenko & Ofir Turel, 2011. "Exploring the management information systems discipline: a scientometric study of ICIS, PACIS and ASAC," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 87(1), pages 1-16, April.
    4. Vincenzo Basile & Massimiliano Giacalone & Paolo Carmelo Cozzucoli, 2022. "The Impacts of Bibliometrics Measurement in the Scientific Community A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Case Studies," Review of European Studies, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 14(3), pages 1-10, November.

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