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1. Introduction: Bradford's law
Bradford's law of scattering is often mentioned together with Zipf's law and Lotka's law as one among the three most important bibliometric laws, and is often considered the best model or example of scientific research that is available within library and information science (LIS). Bradford's law states that documents on a given "subject" is distributed (or scattered) according to a certain mathematical function so that a certain growth in papers on a subject requires a certain growth in the number of journals. The numbers of the groups of journals to produce nearly equal numbers of articles is roughly in proportion to 1: n : n2 ..., where n is called the Bradford multiplier[1] . In other words, Bradford's law states that a small core of, for example, journals have as many papers on a given subject as a much larger number of journals, n , which again has as many papers on the subject as n2 journals.
Bradford himself provided both a graphical and a verbal formulation of his law that have later been found not to be mathematical equivalent. The exact mathematical function has been subject to much subsequent research, and the very question what a Bradford distribution is has been debated.
Bradford's law has been used as an argument about how to build collections, how to select journals to be indexed in bibliographies, how to measure the coverage of bibliographies, how to solve practical problems related to information seeking and retrieval, and by Bradford himself as an argument for a new way to organize bibliographical work and scientific documentation. According to the received view on Bradford's law[2] , this law may consequently help solving many of the practical problems facing the practitioners of our profession. The basic assumption of the advocates of the received view is that Bradford's law functions as a completely neutral and objective method.
We see a number of problems associated with the received view. In this paper we will concentrate on two of these. Our first objection against the received view is that the way one chooses to operationalize the concept of subject, when conducting Bradford analyses, will influence on the results of the very same. Consequently, Bradford's law does not automatically function...