  Background: Zipf's law and Heaps' law are observed in disparate complex
systems. Of particular interests, these two laws often appear together. Many
theoretical models and analyses are performed to understand their co-occurrence
in real systems, but it still lacks a clear picture about their relation.
Methodology/Principal Findings: We show that the Heaps' law can be considered
as a derivative phenomenon if the system obeys the Zipf's law. Furthermore, we
refine the known approximate solution of the Heaps' exponent provided the
Zipf's exponent. We show that the approximate solution is indeed an asymptotic
solution for infinite systems, while in the finite-size system the Heaps'
exponent is sensitive to the system size. Extensive empirical analysis on tens
of disparate systems demonstrates that our refined results can better capture
the relation between the Zipf's and Heaps' exponents. Conclusions/Significance:
The present analysis provides a clear picture about the relation between the
Zipf's law and Heaps' law without the help of any specific stochastic model,
namely the Heaps' law is indeed a derivative phenomenon from Zipf's law. The
presented numerical method gives considerably better estimation of the Heaps'
exponent given the Zipf's exponent and the system size. Our analysis provides
some insights and implications of real complex systems, for example, one can
naturally obtained a better explanation of the accelerated growth of scale-free
networks.
