Analysis of UTIG Publications and Citations

III. Classification of Contributions

III.A. Categories Based on Type of Publication

III.B. Categories Based on Characteristics of Authors

III. Classification of Contributions

III.A. Categories Based on Type of Publication

Obviously, not all scientific contributions are of equal significance or represent equal levels of effort; some are full-length books which may influence generations of scientists, while others are comments or book reviews of less than a page in length and of transient interest to the scientific community. Thus, to make statistical counts of contributions more meaningful, we assigned each contribution to a category based on the nature of the journal, etc., in which it was published.

We define four publication categories that covered the vast majority of contributions; these categories are: publications in 'mainstream' journals, publications in 'archival' journals or volumes, publications in 'proceedings' volumes, and publications in 'other' journals.

• 'Mainstream' journals were those described as non-news periodicals in the "Writers Guide to Periodicals in Earth Science" list in Geowriting, a writing guidebook published by the American Geological Institute. This included the journals one would expect such as Geology, Geophysical Journal, Tectonics, etc. (see Table A.III.3 in Appendix III). In addition to the journals listed in Geowriting, we added seven other journals (Table A.III.3). The reasons for including these were various - Scientific American is not a refereed journal but publication in it is nevertheless considered prestigious, while Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London is not an earth science journal but simply one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in all of science. The remaining added journals are highly respected in marine geology, geophysics, or seismology - subfields which have been strongly represented historically at UTIG.

• 'Archival' publications were those which appeared in non-mainstream and other publications which present the technical results of research. Typical examples include Transactions, Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies; Seismological Research Letters; etc. Archival publications are usually articles but also include encyclopedia entries, full-length books, and chapters in books.

• 'Proceedings' are papers of three pages or longer which appear as full-length papers or extended abstracts in volumes published as proceedings of conferences. In addition, in this category we include such items as maps and geological cross sections which are seldom peer-reviewed and which are often appear in collection publications.

• 'Other' journals were those which commonly report news about science; typical examples are EOS and Geotimes.

To avoid some obvious oversimplifications which arise from a strict use of the above three categories, we defined three additional special categories:

• 'Comments' were items such as news articles, book reviews, reports on recent conferences, or commentary which appear regularly in mainstream or archival journals such as Science or Nature. In most tables and graphs in this report comments are counted in the 'other' category and not tabulated separately.

• 'Technical reports' were full-length technical reports not published by UTIG. While these are not strictly comparable to other contributions they are not counted in UTIG's technical report list; thus there would be no record of them if they were not included in the CL. In most tables and graphs in this report technical reports are counted in the 'archival' category and not tabulated separately.

• 'Biology' publications include all the contributions published by scientists at the Port Aransas Marine Laboratory of the Marine Science Institute. These appear in the CL for historical reasons and do not represent research attributable to the UTIG laboratory; thus in this report these are not counted in any of the graphs or tables unless specifically noted. Of course, publications on biological topics are counted when these were authored by UTIG's staff or students.

Our philosophy in creating these categories was to make it possible to count contributions and attribute citations in a way that was comprehensive but fairÐmaintaining the list as a complete and comprehensive record of research activity while avoiding the possible criticism that counting statistics were overwhelmed by obscure or less significant publications. On the other hand, to keep things simple we chose not to create even more separate categories such as 'full-length books', 'extended abstracts', 'maps and cross sections', 'chapters in mainstream collections', 'well-written articles', 'articles by turkeys', etc.

There are, of course, some quite reasonable limitations in the categories we have chosen. For example, a few of the so-called 'archival' publications would undoubtedly be considered as 'mainstream' in fields outside of the earth sciences; examples in the CL include articles in American Naturalist, Icarus, Journal of Theoretical Biology and Moon. And, inevitably some of the archival earth science publications are full-length books or peer-reviewed, full-length journal articles that are more significant that other contributions which appear in mainstream journals. Finally, we have been unable to inspect many contributions personally, and in a few cases it is unclear to what category they belong. Nevertheless, the present system is, for the most part, objective, and we believe that the majority of contributions are classified properly.

III.B. Categories Based on Characteristics of Authors

Who are the authors contributing to the CL? To make the statistical analysis more meaningful we have assigned each contribution a category based on the employment status of its author or authors. There are five author categories:

• 'G1st' publications have a UTIG staff member as first author. To qualify the first author must be a non-UT-student on the payroll of UTIG. Of course, research often appears in published form only sometime after it is performed, so papers published after individuals leave UT qualify as G1st publications if they appear within three years of the author's last year on the UTIG payroll. For example, consider two contributions having Dale Sawyer as first author:

#665 - Sawyer, D. S., A. T. Hsui, and M. N. Toksoz. Extension, subsidence and thermal evolution of the Los Angeles Basin - a two-dimensional model, Tectonophysics, 133, 15-32, 1987.

#1055 - Sawyer, D. S., N. L. Bangs, and X. Golovchenko. Deconvolving ODP temperature logging tool data to improve borehole temperature estimates: Chile triple junction, J. Geophys. Res., 99, 11995-12003, 1994.

Here #665 is a G1st publication while #1055 is a Gnth publication (see below) because Sawyer, the first author, was employed by UTIG only until 1988.

• 'S1st' publications have a student working principally at UTIG as the first author. To qualify, the student must be working closely with some regular UTIG staff member. As with G1st publications, papers may qualify as S1st publications if they appear within three years after the student has left UT, either with or without a degree.

#814 - Davis, S. D., and C. Frohlich. Single-link cluster analysis, synthetic earthquake catalogues, and aftershock identification, Geophys. J. Int., 104, 289-306, 1991.

#1050 - Davis, S. D., P. Nyffenegger, and C. Frohlich. The 9 April 1993 earthquake in south-central Texas: Was it induced by fluid withdrawal? Bull. Seis. Soc. Am., 85, 1888-1895, 1995.

Here, #814 is an S1st publication while #1050 is a Gnth publication because Davis, the first author, got his Ph. D. in 1989.

• 'Gnth' publications are those which are not in either the G1st or S1st category, but which have a regular UTIG staff member as one of the coauthors.

#1278 -Beck, J. W., J. Recy, F. Taylor, R. L. Edwards, and G. Cabioch. Abrupt changes in Early Holocene sea surface temperature derived from coral records, Nature, 385, 705-707, 1997.

In #1278 the third author, F. Taylor, is a UTIG staff member

• 'F1st' publications are those which are not in the G1st, S1st, or Gnth categories, and which have a regular UT faculty member as either the first or coauthor. Except where explicitly indicated these do not appear in the graphs and tables in this report.

#1196 - Wilson, C., and D. Smith. A numerical study of mineral zoning formed during the cooling of finite volume grains, J. Geophys. Res., 90, 10351-10358, 1985.

Here, both Wilson and Smith are UT faculty members.

• 'B1st' publications have no UTIG coauthors, but are by scientists at the Port Aransas Marine Laboratory of the Marine Science Institute. Except where explicitly indicated these do not appear in the graphs and tables in this report.

#462B - Bottomley, P. J., J. F. Grillo, C. Van Baalen, and F. R. Tabita. Synthesis of nitrogenase and heterocysts by Anabaena sp. CA in the presence of high levels of ammonia, J. Bacteriol., 140, 938-943, 1979.

Note that this author categorization system is specifically designed for obtaining information about UTIG staff and students, and is not complex enough to provide parallel information about staff and students at the Department of Geological Sciences. Thus

#1159 - Tajima, F., and S. P. Grand. Evidence of high velocity anomalies in the transition zone associated with southern Kurile subduction zone, Geophys. Res. Lett., 22, 3139-3142, 1995.

is a G1st publication, even though Grand, a DGS faculty member, is a coauthor. Similarly:

#1225 - Lagoe, M. B., T. A. Davies, J. A. Austin, and H. C. Olson, Foraminiferal constraints on very high resolution seismic stratigraphy and late Quaternary glacial history, New Jersey continental shelf, Palios, 12, 249-266, 1997.

is a Gnth publication, even though Lagoe, a DGS faculty member, is first author. Finally:

#1201 - Dobbs, S., C. Wilson, and M. Backus. Accounting for limited spatial aperture in the waveform inversion of p-tau seismograms, Geophysics, 55, 452-457, 1990.

is an F1st publication, even though Dobbs, a DGS geophysics student, is the first author; this is because Dobbs did not work closely with any UTIG staff member.

The reason for not designing a more parallel and comprehensive system is that there has been no uniform practice concerning the CL and publications by DGS faculty who hold zero-time or summer-funded UTIG appointments. Thus, while Clark Wilson and his students have contributed 24 F1st papers to the CL, the entire list includes only 6 other F1st contributions. This suggests that most other DGS faculty with zero-time UTIG appointments have not included their publications in the CL; this means that any statistical analysis of faculty articles currently on the CL doesn't provide an inadequate estimate of the extent of collaboration between UTIG staff and DGS faculty.

However, in case there is ever a desire to construct a more complete or merged UTIG-DGS contribution list, we have designed the Fortran programs (Appendix IV) so that it would be possible to implement a revised author-categorization scheme automatically. In particular, one program input file is an 'author history' data file which categorizes individuals as faculty, students, or UTIG employees, and gives their dates of employment at UT; it would thus be straightforward to construct any number of different algorithms which act on author character strings and thus reclassify author category.