  Over the last few years, the power law distribution has been used as the data
generating mechanism in many disparate fields. However, at times the techniques
used to fit the power law distribution have been inappropriate. This paper
describes the poweRlaw R package, which makes fitting power laws and other
heavy-tailed distributions straightforward. This package contains R functions
for fitting, comparing and visualising heavy tailed distributions. Overall, it
provides a principled approach to power law fitting.
