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Figure 9.6 A representation of an IPP.

• Articles and received citations.
• Articles and their references.
• Articles and their author(s).
• Books and their loans.
• Words and their uses in a text. In linguistics the terminology types
and tokens is often used in this context.
• Websites and incoming links.
• Websites and outgoing links.
• Websites and webpages belonging to them.
• Cities and inhabitants (demography).
• Employees and their production (economics).
• Employees and their salaries (economics).
All social, communication, and biological networks are examples of
IPPs with nodes as sources e.g., persons in a friendship or authors in a
authorship network, and linked nodes as items, e.g., friends or co-authors
(see Chapter 10: Networks).
Clearly, as follows from the above examples, the notion of an IPP is
very general. It can be interpreted in, and applied to, many domains not
just the information sciences. The regularities we mention further on are,
in many cases, also valid and have applications in these other domains.

9.3.2 The Classical Informetric Laws
The classical informetric laws describe source-items relations of IPPs.
They all express that few sources have many items and many sources have
few items. It can be said that the classical informetric laws describe an