Author Productivity of Research Output in Economics in Universities of Punjab and Chandigarh: Testing Lotka’s Law

The main objective of this study is to investigate the distribution of author productivity in economics and to determine the applicability of Lotka’s Law to university-based economics research. Author productivity patterns, which reveal details about the changing nature of scholarly output and the concentration of research contributions within a discipline, are an essential part of bibliometric analysis. The methodology involved the meticulous collection of 223 doctoral theses accepted by economics departments at three universities, namely Panjab University, Chandigarh; Punjabi University, Patiala; and Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar and scholarly output from 2011 to 2018 was analyzed for this purpose. To ascertain the authorship pattern used for Economics theses at the three universities under consideration, a total of 30066 citations have been examined, 18736 Authors. To evaluate how well Lotka’s Law fits the actual data relative to the inverse-square rule and the potential value of n=2, the economics research employed the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) goodness-of-fit test. In the current study, the author’s productivity did not fit Lotka’s Law.