Quantitative Analysis of the Publishing Landscape in High-Energy Physics

TL;DR

This paper quantitatively analyzes the global collaboration patterns, publication shares, and journal preferences in high-energy physics, providing insights into geographical contributions and the potential shift towards Open Access publishing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to accurately assign authorship to countries and institutions, enabling precise measurement of HEP publication shares and collaboration patterns.

Findings

Identifies the distribution of HEP publications among countries.

Reveals the preferred journals within the HEP community.

Provides data on geographical variation in authorship.

Abstract

World-wide collaboration in high-energy physics (HEP) is a tradition which dates back several decades, with scientific publications mostly coauthored by scientists from different countries. This coauthorship phenomenon makes it difficult to identify precisely the ``share'' of each country in HEP scientific production. One year's worth of HEP scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journals is analysed and their authors are uniquely assigned to countries. This method allows the first correct estimation on a ``pro rata'' basis of the share of HEP scientific publishing among several countries and institutions. The results provide an interesting insight into the geographical collaborative patterns of the HEP community. The HEP publishing landscape is further analysed to provide information on the journals favoured by the HEP community and on the geographical variation of their author bases. These results provide quantitative input to the ongoing debate on the possible transition of HEP publishing to an Open Access model.