Temporal regularities in scientific authorship: the distribution of time to previous publication

This study examines whether the time interval between successive publications by individual authors follows systematic statistical regularities analogous to those observed in classical productivity research. While Lotka’s law describes how scientific output is distributed across authors, far less is known about the temporal spacing of their publications. Using bibliographic data from Scopus, the analysis covers five subject fields representing contrasting research domains. For each field, authors active in a reference year are identified, and the number of years since their most recent prior publication is recorded, yielding a measure of time to previous publication. Across all fields, the resulting distributions are highly skewed, with a strong concentration of short intervals and a pronounced long tail. Power-law modeling provides limited support, as any such behavior is confined to the upper tail and accounts for only a small fraction of observations. Over the fitted range, lognormal models perform at least as well as the power-law model in all five fields and significantly better in three. These findings suggest that temporal regularities in scientific authorship differ from those governing how publication output is distributed across authors, pointing to complementary but distinct dimensions of scientific activity.