Editing Bradford's law (section)

==Scattering==
Bradford's law is also known as Bradford's law of scattering or the Bradford distribution, as it describes how the articles on a particular subject are scattered throughout the mass of periodicals.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=VICKERY|first=B.C.|title=Bradford's Law of Scattering |date=1948-01-01|url=https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026133|journal=Journal of Documentation|volume=4|issue=3|pages=198–203|doi=10.1108/eb026133|issn=0022-0418}}</ref> Another more general term that has come into use since 2006 is information scattering, an often observed phenomenon related to information collections where there are a few sources that have many items of relevant information about a topic, while most sources have only a few.<ref>{{Cite book|chapter-url=https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.1081/E-ELIS3-120043255/information-scattering-suresh-bhavnani-concepción-wilson|chapter=Information Scattering|date=2009-12-17|publisher=CRC Press|isbn=978-0-203-75763-5|language=en|doi=10.1081/E-ELIS3-120043255|title=Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition |pages=2564–2569 }}</ref> This law of distribution in bibliometrics can be applied to the [[World Wide Web]] as well.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Turnbull |first=Don |title=Bibliometrics and the World Wide Web |publisher=University of Toronto Technical Report |year=1997 |url=http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~donturn/research/bibweb.html |access-date=2007-07-05 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070402043221/http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~donturn/research/bibweb.html |archive-date=2007-04-02 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

Hjørland and Nicolaisen identified three kinds of scattering:<ref>{{cite conference |last1=Hjørland |first1= Birger |last2= Nicolaisen |first2= Jeppe |year= 2005 |title= Bradford's law of scattering: ambiguities in the concept of "subject |conference= 5th International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science |pages= 96–106 }}</ref>
#Lexical scattering. The scattering of words in texts and in collections of texts.
#Semantic scattering. The scattering of concepts in texts and in collections of texts.
#Subject scattering. The scattering of items useful to a given task or problem.

They found that the literature of Bradford's law (including Bradford's own papers) is unclear in relation to which kind of scattering is actually being measured.