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The American Political Science Review Citation Classics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2006

Lee Sigelman
Lee Sigelman
Affiliation:
The George Washington University
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Extract

In any scholarly field, some works are widely acknowledged as classics, whereas the rest—indeed, the great majority—are little noted nor long remembered. Indeed, according to the “Iron Law of Important Articles,” the number of significant articles increases only to the extent of the square root of the number of published articles (Holub, Tappeiner, and Eberharter 1991). It follows that as a research literature grows, important articles constitute an ever-decreasing proportion of the total output.

Type
“TOP TWENTY” COMMENTARIES
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 100 , Issue 4 , November 2006 , pp. 667 - 669
Copyright
© 2006 by the American Political Science Association

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