[Math] Information about publishing and citations

reference-request

In the context of some discussions we are having at my university, it has become evident that some statistical information regarding publishing practices in the various areas of mathematics would be necessary to proceed—you know, facts. In particular, I would be immensely happy to know

  • are there measurable and measured differences in the number of papers published by people working in different areas (think PDEs v. Algebraic Geometry v. Number theory v. Combinatorics; top level MSC groups, say)? Here I mean papers published by individual authors as well as collectively.

  • are there measurable and measured differences in the number of citations gotten by papers in each area?; similar question about the out-degree in the citation digraph?

  • what is the time profile of the citations to a typical math paper (ideally, broken by area again), whereby I mean: how are the citations to papers typically distributed in time?

Google has pointed to studies in which such comparisons are made between different disciplines (mathematics v. chemistry, say) but not at all between areas of mathematics.

Can anyone point to such information?

I would love to get hold of MathSciNet's raw tables (only papers, authors, subject area, citations) which would allow me to compute such things… (MathSciNet only has citation information since 2000, and I do not really know if that would make a representative sample for all-time statistics. It would be very interesting to have these kind of information diachronically, but I don't expect that data to be available)

Best Answer

On Mariano's request I'm adding my comment on meta.MO as an answer here. This only concerns (part of) the first bullet point in the question.

There was an article Topical Bias in Generalist Mathematics Journals by Joseph F. Grcar in the december 2010 issue of the Notices of the AMS. According to the text, the statistics are based on 854,547 entries from the 2000-2009 period of the Zentralblatt database. Unfortunately the article remains silent on exactly how the data was gathered, but it might be a starting point for your own investigations.

For the convenience of the readers I take the liberty of reproducing the statistics most relevant for the present question from that article:

For more detailed information please follow this link or the ones provided above.

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