WERE HAS THE CUMULATIVE ADVANTAGE GONE - SOME OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE FREQUENCY-DISTRIBUTION OF SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTIVITY, OF DURATION OF SCIENTIFIC PARTICIPATION, AND OF SPEED OF PUBLICATION

Frequency distributions of scientific productivity are usually based o n cross section cuts of the investigated population of scientists. The refore, some of the registered scientists are involved for the whole p eriod of time, but there are many fractional authors, too. If one comp ares only scientists active in a specialty for the same length of time , the typical bibliometric skewness of the distribution vanishes. But also the duration of participation of a cohort of scientists which beg an their career in the same year is not distributed in a Lotkean manne r. Furthermore, the speed of publication - which might be a better sta tistical indicator of scientific capacities than publication output as such - has more similarity to a normal distribution than to a lognorm al one.