The skewness of scientific productivity

Rodrigo Costas
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Javier Ruiz-Castillo

UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía

Abstract: This paper exploits a unique 2003-2011 large dataset, indexed by Thomson & Reuters, consisting of 17.2 million disambiguated authors classified into 30 broad scientific fields, as well as the 48.2 million articles resulting from a multiplying strategy in which any article co-authored by two or more persons is wholly assigned as many times as necessary to each of them. The dataset is characterized by a large proportion of authors who have their oeuvre in several fields. We measure individual productivity in two ways that are uncorrelated: as the number of articles per person, and as the mean citation per article per person in the 2003-2011 period. We analyze the shape of the two types of individual productivity distributions in each field using size- and scale-independent indicators. For productivity inequality, we use the coefficient of variation. To assess the skewness of productivity distributions we use a robust index of skeweness, as well as the Characteristic Scores and Scales approach. For productivity inequality, we use the coefficient of variation. In each field, we study two samples: the entire population, and what we call “successful authors”, namely, the subset of scientists whose productivity is above their field average. The main result is that, in spite of wide differences in production and citation practices across fields, the shape of field productivity distributions are very similar across fields. The parallelism of the results for the population as a whole and for the subset of successful authors when productivity is measured as mean citation per article per person, reveals the fractal nature of the skewness of scientific productivity in this case. These results are essentially maintained when any article co-authored by two or more persons is fractionally assigned to each of them.

Date: 2014-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/rest/api/core/bitstreams ... 2f951eb23755/content (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The skewness of scientific productivity (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cte:werepe:we1402

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ana Poveda ().