The 20 highest performing authors in Mathematics publish third most articles but have comparably low bibliometrics.
Description
The number of authors per article in the subject area Mathematics is 2.9 on average with a maximum of 9 authors. The mean number of coauthors is increasing by 0.1 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis (n = 3657) were cited 8.2 times on average with a maximum of 357 citations.
Figure 1: Boxplot of the number of authors per paper in the subject area Mathematics. 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 might not be visible. 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.