A STUDY OF SELF-ORGANIZATION OF SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATIONS: FROM STATISTICAL PATTERNS TO LAW

The article considers statistical laws of scientific communications and describes the phenomena and processes of self-organization in library science, science of science, and linguistics. Synergetics is chosen as the methodological basis of research. The aim of the study is to develop a synergistic concept of the emergence of statistical laws of information processes and phenomena in scientific communications for their generalization and presentation in the form of a single law. The concept of synergetics is developed for scientific communications as a manifestation of objectively existing but theoretically unsubstantiated quantitative relations between the subjects and objects of these communications (scientists, publications, and terms). The necessity of using stable distribution laws of probability theory for describing scale-invariant phenomena and processes is noted. In the mathematical sense, the stability of the distribution law is the property of preserving its type for any sum of random variables having this distribution. The mathematical abstraction of a ‘random variable’ in scientific communications takes on a clear concreteness. For Bradford’s regularity, the random variable is the number of articles on a particular topic in the journal; for Lotka’s regularity, it is the number of scholar’s publications; and for Zipf’s regularity, it is the frequency of using the word in the text. The study has determined the characteristic indicator of the stable law of the distribution of processes and phenomena in scientific communications, which is equal to the constant of the golden section. A synergistic concept of scientific communications is formulated as follows: scale-invariant processes and phenomena of self-organization are a manifestation of a stable distribution law of probability theory with a characteristic indicator equal to the constant of the golden rati