An empirical study to order citation statistics between subject fields

TL;DR

This paper empirically compares citation metrics across different academic fields using country-level data, providing a basis for approximate cross-field researcher comparisons without distributional assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to compare citation-based statistics between fields using ratios derived from summary data, avoiding complex distributional models.

Findings

Citation ratios vary significantly between fields

The method enables approximate cross-field researcher comparisons

No distributional assumptions are required

Abstract

An empirical study is conducted to compare citations per publication, statistics and observed Hirsch indexes between subject fields using summary statistics of countries. No distributional assumptions are made and ratios are calculated. These ratios can be used to make approximate comparisons between researchers of different subject fields with respect to the Hirsch index.