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Bibliometrics of the 20 highest performing authors in Earth and Planetary Sciences as well as Environmental Sciences.

Description

The number of authors per article in the subject area Earth and Planetary Sciences is 8.7 on average with a maximum of 468 authors, which is the fourth highest number across all subject areas in our methodology (see below). The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 0.3 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis (n = 2818) were cited 23.4 times on average with a maximum of 1375 citations (fifth highest value among the 27 subject areas).

The number of authors per article in the subject area Environmental Sciences is 5.9 on average with a maximum of 49 authors (Figure 2). The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 0.1 per year in the respective time period. The articles in this analysis (n = 1759) were cited 17.5 times on average and 624 as maximum (seventh highest value among the 27 subject areas).

Figure 1: Boxplot of the number of authors per paper in the subject area Earth and Planetary Sciences. The box denotes 25–75% of the values with the median (bold line) in it. The small circles are outliers. Due to a limitation of the y-axis, some outliers are not shown. The yellow line shows a linear model of the mean number of authors per article with a confidence interval of 0.95 shown in light grey. Data source: Scopus. CC BY 4.0 Schmidt, Fecher, Kobsda.

Figure 2: Boxplot of the number of authors per paper in the subject area Environmental Sciences. The box denotes 25–75% of the values with the median (bold line) in it. The small circles are outliers. Due to a limitation of the y-axis, some outliers are not shown. The yellow line shows a linear model of the mean number of authors per article with a confidence interval of 0.95 shown in light grey. Data source: Scopus. CC BY 4.0 Schmidt, Fecher, Kobsda.

Methodology

The results of the Advanced search in Scopus were restricted by an algorithm with

  • a time period of publishing (2010 to 2016)
  • the document types (articles or reviews),
  • and a quantitative limitation regarding the publication output (articles by the 20 highest performing authors with the most Scopus listed articles in every subject area).

For details and code see Schmidt et al. 2017.