Have there been any studies of publication rates in Mathematics?
We are trying to construct a workload model for the Faculty of Science and Engineering at my institution. Part of this involves assigning a fixed number of "points" for each published paper. It seems that our colleagues in some of the sciences publish many more papers than we do in Mathematics, which leaves us asking for the number of points per paper to be far higher in Mathematics than elsewhere. But we need to be able to back up our impressions with facts.
What I would like to do is to get some idea of how many papers one might expect a research mathematician to publish over, say, a five-year period. I recognize that there are a lot of problems here with the words "expect" and "research mathematician", not to mention problems with counting a 100-page paper on the same footing as a 5-page paper, or a paper in a "top" journal on the same footing as a paper in a not-so-top journal; I want to stay away from all those subjective and opinion-based issues.
I would like to know whether there are any publically-available figures along the following lines: pick a university where faculty are expected to be engaged in research; find out how many publications each member of the Math Department has had over (say) a five-year period; publish the median, or some other measure of the distribution of the publication numbers (not the mean, which could be skewed by a small number of members publishing a large number of papers).
I'm aware of the paper by Jerrold Grossman, Patterns of collaboration in mathematical research, SIAM News 35 (2002), but that's a study of all papers listed in Math Reviews, which includes people who published a paper or two and then left research mathematics for other fields. I'm really interested only in people who are employed by departments where publication in refereed journals is expected.
Best Answer
Here is the AMS culture statement on publication rates in mathematics. Even the best young mathematicians publish average of two or fewer articles per year.