Informetric distributions, part II: Resilience to ambiguity

Abstract

This article continues the discussion of the informetric distributions begun in a companion paper. In the earlier paper, the informetric distributions were introduced and found to be variants of a single distribution. It was suggested that this might be explained in terms of that distribution being unusually resilient to ambiguity. In this paper the notion of resilience to ambiguity is made precise. By way of introduction, a number of simple examples of resilience, taken from the social sciences, are discussed. This approach is then applied to the informetric distributions themselves. It is argued that the form taken by the informetric regularities does indeed make them insensitive to the wide range of ambiguities that occur when measuring the output of social activity, and that this ubiquitous form is unusual in having this property. © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.