Why and how academic Olympic medals distribute? Evidence from successors in three top and multidisciplinary journals

Publishing papers in prestigious journals such as Nature, Science and PNAS is a great feat, like athletes winning Olympics Gold Medals. Under widespread global competition, the law of allocation may prove interesting. In this study, we aimed to understand the distribution mechanism of top journal publishing and collected metadata in Nature, Science and PNAS to discover how successful academic entities distribute. A mathematical formula is used to explain for such distributions in the context of fixed geometric mean and maximum entropy principle. Results show the number of papers published by an academic producer and its rank in the successful community compliance with the power law and the result could enrich Lotka’s law. If the geometric mean of a system such as paper-and-rank distribution is given, then its entropy automatically reaches its maximum value to form the power law and perform a linear distribution. This study finds that power law operates to the top journals’ publication allocation and is the policymakers, scientists and funders in different tiers could choose different strategies to improve their rank in the distribution according to the discoveries.