Also known as Price’s square root law, this refers to an empirical rule which states that the majority of scientific publications in any field of study would likely come from a comparatively small number of authors. To be precise, about half the total publications in a field will be authored by a small number of authors equal to the square root of the total number of authors. So, if the entire published literature in a field was authored by 1 million scientists in total, according to Price’s law, about half of the literature would likely have been authored by around 1,000 authors. The rule was proposed by British physicist Derek J. de Solla Price.
