Samuel Clement Bradford (10 January 1878 in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

– 13 November 1948) was a British mathematician,

librarian A librarian is a person who works professionally in a library providing access to information, and sometimes social or technical programming, or instruction on information literacy to users. The role of the librarian has changed much over time ...

and

documentalist A documentalist is a professional, trained in documentation science and specializing in assisting researchers in their search for scientific and technical documentation. With the development of bibliographical databases such as MEDLINE, documental ...

at the

Science Museum A science museum is a museum devoted primarily to science. Older science museums tended to concentrate on static displays of objects related to natural history, paleontology, geology, industry and industrial machinery, etc. Modern trends in ...

in London. He developed " Bradford's law" (or the "law of scattering") regarding differences in demand for scientific journals. This work influences

bibliometrics Bibliometrics is the use of statistical methods to analyse books, articles and other publications, especially in regard with scientific contents. Bibliometric methods are frequently used in the field of library and information science. Bibliom ...

and

citation analysis Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in documents. It uses the directed graph of citations — links from one document to another document — to reveal properties of the documents. A ty ...

of scientific publications. Bradford founded the British Society for International Bibliography (BSIB) (est. 1927) and he was elected president of

International Federation for Information and Documentation The International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID) was an international organization that was created to promote universal access to all recorded knowledge through the creation of an international classification system. FID stand ...

(FID) in 1945. Bradford was a strong proponent of the UDC and of establishing

abstract Abstract may refer to: * ''Abstract'' (album), 1962 album by Joe Harriott * Abstract of title a summary of the documents affecting title to parcel of land * Abstract (law), a summary of a legal document * Abstract (summary), in academic publishi ...

s of the

scientific literature : ''For a broader class of literature, see Academic publishing.'' Scientific literature comprises scholarly publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences. Within an academic field, sci ...

Bibliography

*Bradford, S. C. (1934). Sources of information on specific subjects. ''Engineering'', 26, p. 85–86. *Bradford, S. C. (1946). ''Romance of Roses''. London: F. Muller. *Bradford, S. C. (1948). ''Documentation''. London: Crosby Lockwood. *Bradford, S. C. (1953). ''Documentation''. 2nd ed. With an introd. by Jesse H. Shera and Margaret E. Egan. London: Crosby Lockwood.

References

*Gosset, M. & Urquhart, D. J. (1977). S. C. Bradford, Keeper of the Science Museum Library 1925-1937. ''Journal of Documentation'', 33, 173-179. English librarians Information scientists British information theorists 1878 births 1948 deaths Bibliometricians {{UK-mathematician-stub