Are the authors of highly cited articles also the most productive ones?

Abstract

Ever more frequently, governments have decided to implement policy measures intended to foster and reward excellence in scientific research. This is in fact the intended purpose of national research assessment exercises. These are typically based on the analysis of the quality of the best research products; however a different approach to analysis and intervention is based on the measure of productivity of the individual scientists, meaning the overall impact of their entire scientific production over the period under observation. This work analyzes the convergence of the two approaches, asking if and to what measure the most productive scientists achieve highly-cited articles; or vice versa, what share of highly-cited articles is achieved by scientists that are "non-top" for productivity. To do this we use bibliometric indicators, applied to the 2004-2008 publications authored by academics of Italian universities and indexed in the Web of Science.

References in corpus (8)

• The relationship between scientists' research performance and the degree of internationalization of their research
• A heuristic approach to author name disambiguation in bibliometrics databases for large-scale research assessments
• The contribution of star scientists to overall sex differences in research productivity
• The importance of accounting for the number of co-authors and their order when assessing research performance at the individual level in the life sciences
• Revisiting the scaling of citations for research assessment
• A field-standardized application of DEA to national-scale research assessment of universities
• Individual research performance: a proposal for comparing apples to oranges
• Mapping excellence in national research systems: the case of Italy

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Association between productivity and journal impact across disciplines and career age
• Predicting article quality scores with machine learning: The UK Research Excellence Framework
• Ranking research institutions by the number of highly-cited articles per scientist
• Highly-cited papers in Library and Information Science (LIS): Authors, institutions, and network structures
• Gender shapes the relationship between productivity and journal prestige in science