Analysis of publications and citations from a geophysics research institute

We here perform an analysis of all 1128 publications produced by scientists during their employment at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, a geophysical research laboratory founded in 1972 that currently employs 23 Ph.D.-level scientists. We thus assess research performance using as bibliometric indicators such statistics as publications per year, citations per paper, and cited half-lives. To characterize the research style of individual scientists and to obtain insight into the origin of certain publication-counting discrepancies, we classified the 1128 publications into four categories that differed significantly with respect to statistics such as lifetime citation rates, fraction of papers never-cited after 10 years, and cited half-life. The categories were: mainstream (prestige journal) publications -32.6 lifetime cit/pap, 2.4% never cited, and 6.9 year half-life; archival (other refereed)-12.0 lifetime cit/pap. 21.5% never cited, and 9.5 years half-life; articles published as proceedings of conferences-5.4 lifetime cit/pap, 26.6% never cited, and 5.4 years half-life; and "other" publications (news articles, book reviews, etc.)-4.2 lifetime cit/pap, 57.1% never cited, and 1.9 years half-life. Because determining cited half-lives is highly similar to a well-studied phenomenon in earthquake seismology, which was familiar to us, we thoroughly evaluate five different methods for determining the cited half-life and discuss the robustness and limitations of the various methods. Unfortunately, even when data are numerous the various methods often obtain very different values for the half-life. Our preferred method determines half-life from the ratio of citations appearing in back-to-back 5-year periods. We also evaluate the reliability of the citation count data used for these kinds of analysis and conclude that citation count data are often imprecise. All observations suggest that reported differences in cited half-lives must be quite large to be significant.