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Martin Schmidt, Benedikt Fecher, Christian Kobsda

Multidisciplinary science – multiple authors?

Bibliometrics for the 20 highest performing authors in Multidisciplinary Science.
28 August 2017
Authorship

Description

The number of authors per article in the subject area Multidisciplinary is 3.3 on average with a maximum of 58 authors. The mean number of coauthors is decreasing by 0.1 per year in the respective time period (Figure 1). The articles in this analysis (n = 1111) were cited 14.5 times on average with a maximum of 348 citations.

Figure 1: Boxplot of the number of authors per paper in the subject area Multidisciplinary. 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.

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.845810

Cite as

Schmidt, M., Fecher, B., Kobsda, C. (2017). Bibliometrics for the 20 Highest Performing Authors in Multidisciplinary Science. Elephant in the lab. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.845810

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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