A new type of partial-sums distributions (Q5951988)

The article examines two main types of summation and proposes a new type of partial-sums distributions influenced by the generalized Brookes theoretical explorations of the Bradford laws (Brookes, 1977). The new type of summation is also strongly supported by the so-called rank-frequency distributions from linguistics (and musicology), distributions for which the frequency of an entity at rank \(x\) depends in a way on the sum of frequencies of all entities at ranks \(j>x\). Some of the properties of this new class of distributions are analyzed: the relations between the probability generating function and the moments of the generating and descendent distributions are pointed out, and the unique distribution that remains unaltered after the new summation is shown to be the 1-displaced Salvia-Bollinger distribution.