Cognitive Scaffold

Preparing your thinking workspace

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MENTAL MODEL · M9290

Bradford's Law

Bradford's Law
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Updated 2026-08-15

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INTRODUCTION

English translation pending.

CORE DEFINITION

The entry pairs two notions. Bradford's Law says that when journals are ranked by how many papers they produce on a topic, a small core produces most of the papers and a large periphery produces few, so attention belongs in the core zone. The entry also carries the nine criteria of Austin Bradford Hill, strength, consistency, specificity, temporality, dose-response, plausibility, coherence, experimental evidence, and analogy, for judging whether an association is causal.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

- Rank your sources: put attention on the core zone rather than spreading it evenly. - Work the criteria: after finding a correlation, check it against each criterion. - Weight the strong ones: temporality and dose-response carry the most evidence.

anchor

Anchor fast decisions

Journal output and causal inference both follow concentration rather than uniformity: most relevant papers sit in a few sources, and most of the causal case rests on a few criteria. Spreading effort evenly wastes it on the periphery, which is why the priority rule and the criteria checklist work the same way.

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Source support: Explicit

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    en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford%27s_lawZH · Explicit
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