Towards a multi-disciplinary Bradford law

Bradford's law, perhaps the most well known of the Informetric regularities, analyzes the scattering of articles in a single discipline over journals. Yet journals are multi-disciplinary entities. This paper discusses the implications for Bradford's law of the multi-disciplinary character of journals, and defines a simple model that indicates the evolution of journals as a competition among subjects for space.Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Bibliometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics in Berlin (Germany), September 11–15, 1993.The research reported in this paper was carried out while the author was a Fullbright fellow at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore, India. The author gratefully acknowledges this support.