A macro analysis of productivity differences across fields: Challenges in the measurement of scientific publishing

Abstract

While many studies have compared research productivity across scientific fields, they have mostly focused on the “hard sciences,” in many cases due to limited publication data for the “softer” disciplines; these studies have also typically been based on a small sample of researchers. In this study we use complete publication data for all researchers employed at Norwegian universities over a 4‐year period, linked to biographic data for each researcher. Using this detailed and complete data set, we compare research productivity between five main scientific domains (and subfields within them), across academic positions, and in terms of age and gender. The study's key finding is that researchers from medicine, natural sciences, and technology are most productive when whole counts of publications are used, while researchers from the humanities and social sciences are most productive when article counts are fractionalized according to the total number of authors. The strong differences between these fields in publishing forms and patterns of coauthorship raise questions as to whether publication indicators can justifiably be used for comparison of productivity across scientific disciplines.

Measuring the productivity of national R&D systems: Challenges in cross-national comparisons of R&D input and publication output indicators

“…A fractional count gives the number of papers "creditable" to the country (Moed 2005). The different effects of whole counting versus fractionalized counting have been demonstrated at the country level (Gauffriau et al 2008); subfield level (Piro et al 2013); and, individual level (Lee & Bozeman 2005).…”

“…van Leeuwen et al 2003;Abramo, D'Angelo & Pugini 2008;Kivinen, Hedman & Kaipainen 2013;Piro, Aksnes & Rørstad 2013;Rørstad & Aksnes 2015). Such studies may be based on data from the organisations involved, national databases and publication databases such as WoS.…”

Publishing and perishing: an academic literacies framework for investigating research productivity

“…Currently, the bulk of this research is quantitative in nature and attempts to tease out the relative explanatory power of individual traits such as gender, age, rank, or discipline (see, e.g. Bentley 2011;Piro, Aksnes, and Rørstad 2013;Teodorescu 2000). Factors related to the institutional setting have also been explored extensively.…”

Beyond Coverage: Toward a Bibliometrics for the Humanities

“…The consequence is that a lower share of the total publications by humanities scholars is covered by the system. This disadvantage is partly compensated by publications being fractionalized over authors, which has shown to benefit scholars in the humanities compared to disciplines where co-authorship is common (Piro et al 2013). …”