Can analysis of word frequency distinguish between writings of different authors?

Various literature writings are compared by the “rank distance”, d, between two word frequency Zipf plots introduced by S. Havlin (Physica A 216 (1995) 148). We studied 22 books written by six authors. For this ensemble of books we find that the mean distance between books written by the same authors ( d = 15.2 ± 2.6) is considerably smaller than that between books written by different authors ( d = 21.8 ± 3.2), in good agreement with earlier results on a smaller sample of books. Our results suggest that the distribution of the rank difference of the same words in different books decays exponentially.