Labor productivity, labor impact, and co-authorship of research institutions: publications and citations per full-time equivalents

Abstract

Indicators of productivity and impact of research institutions are based on counts of the institution members’ publications and the citations those publications attracted. How can scientometricians count publications and citations on the meso-level (here, institution level)? There are three variables: the institution’s scientific staff in the observed time frame, their publications in that time, and the publications’ citations. Considering co-authorship of the publications, one can count 1 for every author (whole counting) or 1/n for n co-authors (fractional counting). One can apply this procedure to publications as well as citations. New in this article is the consideration of complete lists of scientific staff members, which include the exact extent of employment, to calculate the labor input based on full-time equivalents (FTE) and also of complete lists of publications by those staff members. This approach enables a size-independent calculation of labor productivity (number of publications per FTE) and labor impact (number of citations per FTE) on the meso-level. Additionally, we experiment with the difference and the quotient between summarizing values from the micro-level (person level) and aggregating whole counting values directly on the meso-level as an indicator for the institution’s predominant internal or external co-authorship.