Citations to Australian Astronomy: 5 and 10 Year Benchmarks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes citation metrics of Australian astronomers over 5 and 10 years, providing benchmarks and new insights into research performance and productivity within the Australian astronomical community.

Contribution

It offers updated citation metrics and benchmarks for Australian astronomers, including new analyses for early-career researchers and an empirical relation for h-index and total citations.

Findings

10-year h-index and total citations follow a specific empirical relation.

Histograms and percentiles reveal distribution of citation metrics.

Identified 383 research-active astronomers in Australia.

Abstract

Expanding upon Pimbblet's informative 2011 analysis of career h-indices for members of the Astronomical Society of Australia, we provide additional citation metrics which are geared to a) quantifying the current performance of b) all professional astronomers in Australia. We have trawled the staff web-pages of Australian Universities, Observatories and Research Organisations hosting professional astronomers, and identified 383 PhD-qualified, research-active, astronomers in the nation - 131 of these are not members of the Astronomical Society of Australia. Using the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, we provide the three following common metrics based on publications in the first decade of the 21st century (2001-2010): h-index, author-normalised citation count and lead-author citation count. We additionally present a somewhat more inclusive analysis, applicable for many early-career researchers, that is based on publications from 2006-2010. Histograms and percentiles, plus top-performer lists, are presented for each category. Finally, building on Hirsch's empirical equation, we find that the (10-year) h-index and (10-year) total citation count T can be approximated by the relation h = (0.5+sqrt{T})/sqrt{5} for h > 5.