Publication Numbers are Increasing at American Research Universities

Abstract

A Review of: Budd, J. (2017). Faculty publications and citations: a longitudinal examination. College & Research Libraries, 78(1), 80–89. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.78.1.80 Abstract Objective – To study the publishing output and citation activity of faculty at research universities. Design – Bibliometric and citation analysis. Setting – Academic citation databases. Subjects – Institutions in the United States that are members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Methods – This study builds on three previous studies conducted by the author looking at faculty publication productivity, which were conducted for three different time periods beginning in 1991. For the present study, the author searched Scopus by institution to collect the total number of publications and citations for the faculty of more than 100 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member universities, covering the years 2011 to 2013. The author acquired the total number of faculty at each institution from the ARL website. The faculty number from the ARL website and publication and citation data from Scopus were used to calculate the per capita publication and citation numbers for each institution. The author calculated the total mean number of publications and the mean number of per capita publications per university. Chi tests were used to compare the means for statistical significance.  Main Results – The number of both total and per capita publications for each institution went up over the course of all three studies. The mean number of total publications per university for 1991 to 1993, the first time period studied, was 4,595.8; for the time period of the current study, 2011 to 2013, the mean was 9,662.0. For per capita publications, the mean for 1991 to 1993 was 3.56 and the mean for the present study was 5.96. Based on chi-square tests, the results were found to be statistically significant. Conclusions – The study found that the number of total publications increased significantly over time, exceeding the author’s statistical expectations based on previous work.