Bibliometrics for the subject areas Arts and Humanities as well as Social Sciences for the 20 highest performing authors.
Description
The number of authors per article in the subject area Arts and Humanities is 2.1 on average with a maximum of 8 authors. The mean number of coauthors is decreasing by 0.01 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis (n = 749) were cited 6.6 times on average with a maximum of 50 citations.
The number of authors per article in the subject area Social Sciences is 2.7 on average with a maximum of 14 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 = 1050) were cited 9.7 times on average and 485 as maximum.
Figure 1: Boxplot of the number of authors per paper in the subject area Arts and Humanities. The box denotes 25–75% of the values with the median (bold line) in it. The small circles are outliers. 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 Social Sciences. The box denotes 25–75% of the values with the median (bold line) in it. The small circles are outliers. 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.