THE FREQUENCIES OF OCCURRENCE OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS WITH AUTHORS OF EACH INITIAL LETTER AND THEIR VARIATION WITH NATIONALITY

This paper introduces ''alphabet spectra'' which are the 26 frequencie s of occurrence of scientific papers in a given sample with at least o ne author of each initial, A, B,...Z. The sum of these frequencies exc eeds unity because of multiple authorships. Formulae are given relatin g this sum to the mean number of authors per paper in the sample. The method is applied to show the increase in this number over the last 15 years in different fields of science and for different countries. The ''alphabet spectra'' vary greatly depending on the nationality of the scientists concerned and can be compared to frequency absorption spec tra for chemical elements or molecules. The spectra can be used to det ermine the national composition of a country's scientific authors and how this has changed with time.