Power laws in elementary and heavy-ion collisions

We review from the point of view of nonextensive statistics the ubiquitous presence in elementary and heavy-ion collisions of power law distributions. Special emphasis is placed on the conjecture that this is just a reflection of some intrinsic fluctuations existing in the hadronic systems considered. These systems are summarily described by a single parameter q playing the role of a nonextensivity measure in the nonextensive statistical models based on Tsallis entropy