A CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON LEIMKUHLER'S ‘EXACT’ FORMULATION OF THE BRADFORD LAW

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Abstract
It is argued that the powerful techniques of OR operate on only a small fraction of the statistical information that the social sciences usually provide. This argument is illustrated by Leimkuhler's recent claim to have found an ‘exact’ fit to the Bradford law. An elementary theorem of Shannon information theory shows that his new function is applied to only 2·3% of the statistical information inherent in the bibliography he chooses and that Bradford's original simple formulation not only fits this segment but also the whole bibliography more closely than the new formulation. As every loss of statistical information can be measured, it can be shown that sophisticated mathematical techniques cannot compensate for the information they squander.

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