User:Whymosquito

Information scattering as in Information Science is a phenomenon related to "Information Collections", where most information sources have only a few topics of relevant information covered while only few information sources have many topics.

History
The ﬁrst report on the phenomenon of information scattering is attributed to Bradford[1].

Theory
Bradford, quantified this observation. He noticed the regularity in the numbers of papers on two scientiﬁc subjects across different journals. If the journals in each of the two scientiﬁc subjects were ﬁrst ranked in order of the numbers of papers they contain on a subject, and then divided into, say, three groups with an equal number of papers, the numbers of journals in successive groups grew in the ratio of 1: k: k^2. For example, if 3000 papers on a subject were found in 800 journals, then the ratio of (ranked) journals, in successive groups of 1000 papers, is 42: 158:600, or approximately 1: 3.8: 3.8^2.

This mathematical regularity, which predicts a core, middle, and peripheral groups of journals for any subject, is often referred to as Bradford’s Law of Scattering and the resulting distribution of papers across journals as a Bradford Distribution.