Transposing Zipf's Law and its Application to the Rank of Scientific and Technical Articles of 30 Economies
The general Zipf's law studies the influence relation that frequency is suffered by rank, where rank is equivalent to the independent variable and frequency can be looked upon as the dependent variable. But after transposing these two variables, what this paper study is how rank influences frequency, where frequency matches the independent variable and rank can be regarded as the dependent variable. Besides putting forward the transposing Zipf's law, this paper discusses the rank of scientific and technical articles of 30 economies (countries and regions). The research results show that the rank effect and the inverse power function are exactly in existence. The empirical analysis of continuous 3 years indicates that the inverse power function takes place really between the rank and the number of papers. This transposing Zipf's law will obviously cause the rank effect: when rank is top, it is very difficult to be raised again; when rank is low, it is comparatively easy to be changed.