This paper presents a mathematical model using probability in order to explain the case of library circulation data. In particular, we model the distribution of use of the articles according to their distribution in scientific journals. We have already undertaken similar work with a geometrical law [6]. The ‘no use’ of articles is an important aspect of the question of data flow. When the weight of ‘no use’ became important, we obtained a result which appears quite surprising: the distribution of used articles is a geometrical distribution too. What follows is an investigation of whether the model of Poisson and negative binomial distributions are valid.
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