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Martin Schmidt, Benedikt Fecher, Christian Kobsda

Earth, Environment, and authors

Bibliometrics of the 20 highest performing authors in Earth and Planetary Sciences as well as Environmental Sciences.
24 July 2017
Authorship

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.

Author info

Martin Schmidt is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Landscape Systems Analysis within Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research and associate researcher at Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society.

Benedikt Fecher is the programme director of the research programme Knowledge Dimension and heads the Open Science research group at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society.

Christian Kobsda works as the political consultant at the Leibniz Association and is an associate researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.832212

Cite as

Schmidt, M., Fecher, B., Kobsda, C. (2017). Bibliometrics of the 20 highest performing authors in Earth and Planetary Sciences as well as Environmental Sciences. Elephant in the lab. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.832212

References

Collapse references

Schmidt, M., Fecher, B., Kobsda, C. (2017). Methodology for the analysis of authors using meta data from Scopus. Elephant in the Lab. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.805718

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