Individual researchers’ research productivity: a comparative analysis of counting methods

Introduction Productivity can be studied at different scales (e.g., country, organisation, author). The present work examines productivity at the researcher level, with the financial support received by researchers representing input and researchers’ papers representing output. Regardless of the scale at which productivity is examined, science must be considered a collective endeavour, particularly since there is a growing trend towards more collaboration in nearly every field. Importantly though, very distinct collaboration practices exist across fields of research. For instance, over 90% of the papers in the natural sciences and engineering (NSE) are written in collaboration (more than one author), whereas this proportion is 60% in the social sciences and 10% in the humanities (Lariviere, Gingras and Archambault, 2006). Whether one uses fractional or whole counts can be expected to yield hugely different productivity measures (Lindsey, 1980; Egghe, Rousseau, and Van Hooydonk, 2000; Gauffriau, M. et al., 2008). This paper examines how fractional versus whole-paper counting affects the measurement of researchers’ performance in the social sciences and the humanities (SSH) versus in the NSE.