How does one measure the productivity of a university research laboratory? The true products like 'new knowledge', 'progress' or 'solutions to societal problems' are difficult to quantify. One quantifiable product is the publication of articles in academic journals; perhaps for this reason research institutions often faithfully keep track of staff publications. Of course, simply counting publications is of questionable value because some publications are insignificant or without influence. However, one way to measure influence is to count citations - references to an article in subsequently published research. Since an organization called Institute for Scientific Information began publishing the Science Citation Index in 1963, counting citations has become widely recognized as a measure of research influence.
In recent years the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) occasionally has to provide statistics concerning publications and citations. Although the research group which is now UTIG has kept a contributions list since 1972, over the years there has been no uniform policy defining what is acceptable as a contribution, or even concerning the appropriate format for keeping the list. Moreover, it is clear that many citations have been missed in the recent efforts to count citations, especially as there has been no effort to count citations to articles coauthored by UTIG staff that were first-authored by student or other non-UTIG-staff members.
For these reasons we have undertaken a thorough revision of the UTIG contribution list and performed a detailed analysis of UTIG publication activity. In addition, we obtained citation information for articles on the UTIG contribution list; we report information only after 1993 as this is the first year that the Science Citation Index is available on a software-analyzable CD-ROM. This report is a summary of the revision and analysis procedures we applied to the UTIG contribution list, as well as a summary of the citations to articles on the list. We hope that by revising the list and providing a thorough statistical summary, it will be simpler to keep this information up-to-date in the future.
Specifically, this technical report summarizes five related efforts involving the UTIG contribution list (CL):
What is now UTIG began in 1972, when Maurice Ewing left Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory (LDGO) at Columbia University and founded the Division of Earth and Planetary Sciences of the Marine Biomedical Institute in Galveston, Texas. Subsequently this became part of the University of Texas at Austin; in 1974 it became the Geophysics Laboratory of the Marine Science Institute (MSI) when it was joined administratively with a biology laboratory in Port Aransas, Texas. In 1981 MSI's geophysics and biology labs were split when the Geophysics Laboratory moved to Austin, Texas, and UTIG was formed.
What is now known as the UTIG Contributions List (CL) was initiated in April 1973, and was modeled after a similar compilation at LDGO. Thus, when the biology lab in Port Aransas joined with the Galveston group to form MSI, numerous biological publications were incorporated into the list (e. g., see #101-#144). Often there was confusion between the Galveston and Port Aransas laboratories about available numbers; thus, occasionally two publications received the same number (e. g., see #145A and #145B). Splitting the two laboratories didn't entirely solve this problem (e. g., see #801A, #801B)
Throughout the CL's history there have been various different policies about what sort of publications it recorded. Originally the CL included technical reports published at UT, but subsequently a separate list and numbering system was formed for technical reports. Nevertheless, when we began the revision, some still remained on the CL. The CL also contained several abstracts (e. g., #119, #182 and #419) and brochures (e. g., #1104, #1108); however, these were exceptions - the general philosophy seemed to be that it recorded scientific articles in technical journals or books, including multiple-author articles when any one of the coauthors is a student or employee of the laboratory. What constitutes a scientific article is inevitably a fuzzy concept; the recent CL includes articles reporting news and comment (e. g., #1047, #1131) as well as articles in peer-reviewed journals.
When we began this project the list was fraught with mistakes of various kinds . Obvious errors concerned spelling, capitalization, and format inconsistencies. More interesting errors involved obviously incorrect titles; e. g., the title to #723 appeared as "Analysis leading to the seduction of scattered noise on deep marine seismic records." Several entries were so incomplete it wasn't possible to determine whether they had actually been published. In other cases perfectly respectable published articles were listed twice (see #343 and #491B, and other examples in Table A.III.2, Appendix III). There were also other cases of double counting, e. g., where editorships of volumes were given a contribution number even though the editor had several articles within the volume (e. g., see #1114-#1116 in Appendix V and #1113 in Table A.III.2, Appendix III)
In order to be objective about revising contribution list, we used the criteria in Table A.III.1 (Appendix III). Basically, the philosophy is that the CL includes published articles, etc., which report basic scientific results or items of news and commentary which bring recognition to UTIG. The list does not include brief abstracts, letters to the editor, or internal UTIG publications such as technical reports; it does not include published items unless an individual associated with UTIG is specifically listed as an author or coauthor. While this policy may allow some doubtful items to remain in the list, we felt this was justified. While one can always classify contributions into categories to investigate productivity of various kinds, one can't classify things if they aren't a part of the list; in our experience it can be exceedingly difficult to find 'gray-area' contributions years after publication. For the same reason, we allowed contributions that were incompletely or confusingly described to remain on the list, since better information may surface anon.
There is no doubt that some errors remain; however, the revised CL (Appendix V) is much improved from the previous version. To find errors in title, volumes, page numbers, etc., we asked all current UTIG scientists to review contributions on which they were an author or coauthor; for the remaining contributions which appear in earth science journals available at UT, we checked the information ourselves. Finally, Ruth Buskirk, a biologist and former UTIG staff member checked the MSI biological contributions for obvious format errors.
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