Article

Revisiting Taylor's law, rediscovering Smith's law: A dual framework for scaling heterogeneity

2026-08-11

Abstract excerpt

Taylor's (1961) power law (TPL)—variance scales with mean density—originated in agricultural entomology but now spans the natural and social sciences and even the humanities. Cited over 8,000 times and featured in Nature for decades, its reach far exceeds its ecological origins. Yet TPL has been dormant in Nature for the past two decades, though it remains active in PNAS. Smith's (1938) law (SPL)—crop yield varian...

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Identifiers and source

Literature Corpus work: 85aba019-3512-5a2c-867b-24796476af27
DOI: 10.32942/x2596j

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