Exploratory analysis of affiliation information in Geophysics articles from 1936 to 2017

Abstract

Author affiliation information has been extracted from the online issues of Geophysics dating back to 1936. This information has been parsed to identify which affiliations belong to the industry, which belong to research institutions, and which belong to individual universities. Visualizing this data uncovered long-term trends, such as the exponential growth in the yearly number of articles published, the continuous decline of industry publications in relative terms since 1936 and in absolute terms since 1981, the decline in publications by some countries and rise in publications by others, and the increase in collaboration measures such as the number of authors per article and team size. Understanding these trends may be valuable both for institutional decision making and for individual career planning.