Abstract:Observations of the surface layer and the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) were collected as part of the Lower Atmosphere and Precipitation Study (LAPS), which investigated the relationship between the surface conditions and the ABL processes. The LAPS was part of the Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) program, under the auspices of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). Observations began in August 2003 over a flat surface region in midlatitude China at 32Ð55°N, 116Ð78°E. Observations before, during, and after the Meiyu season in China provided data for surface conditions varying from relatively dry to moist. Preliminary analysis of the surface and the ABL observations shows relationships between the surface fluxes and the ABL structure. ABL depth was enhanced by sensible heat flux. Fluctuations in the ABL depth corresponded to plume-like wind structures within the ABL. Day-to-day variability in ABL depth was controlled mainly by buoyancy flux over the surface during dry periods. It was also affected by vertical motion at the top of the ABL, especially during wet periods.

The number of papers and number of citations have been widely used as indices for research capability in various situations, such as the comparison of research institutions and performance evaluation of researchers. However, it is well known that these naïve indices have large disciplinary variations, making them difficult to apply across disciplinary boundaries. Although various normalized citation indices have been provided by research assessment tools, no widely accepted indices have been established for the number of papers despite this number's significance in research performance metrics. In the present paper, we propose a normalized index for the number of papers to enable a fair comparison of research capability. A key idea is to introduce the concept of work efficiency into the quantification of publication productivity. We further investigate the effects of normalization on the publication data of our institute. The normalization resulted in a relative change in the total number of papers in inverse relation to publication intensity in each discipline. Similar results were obtained between two major bibliometric databases for the publication productivity in well-populated disciplines with similar field coverage. Bootstrap analysis revealed that a sample size of 200-300 is required to obtain statistically significant publication productivity.

The difficulty in evaluating the research performance of groups is attributable to the following two factors: 1) difference of population size or discipline of group members and 2) skewed distribution of the research performance of individuals. This study attempts to overcome this difficulty, focusing on the research performance based on publication productivity. We employ the normalized index for the number of papers, in which publication efficiency was considered and disciplinary variation in the publication intensity was corrected by the disciplinary averages, to calculate a new percentile rank score. The score was developed on the basis of the principle that a person who is rare is valuable. The score was also tested with publication data for faculty members of 17 Japanese universities. The employment of the normalized index increased the score of universities with relatively few faculty members working in the disciplines of high productivity, resulting in more plausible university rankings. The rankings show a high correlation with those for a previously established percentile rank score, which was developed for citation analysis, and they are consistent with the judgment by evaluators of several universities under study. The advantage of the new score over the previous one is that it has no room for arbitrariness in determining the scheme of rank classification and the weights given to each rank class.