Characterisation and measurement methods for author productivity and research vitality: a study of the R&D management field

This paper concerns methods of analysing publication data which may assist policy makers in ascertaining the vitality of particular scientific fields. A method to indicate author productivity and the relationship with the vitality of the research field is presented, based on techniques from engineering control statistics, and employing transformations suggested by Tukey. The method employed analyses author productivity and gives useful indications of the potential within a research field, while avoiding the assumptions of earlier papers based on the use of event history analysis. Applying these new techniques to a data set of the entire publications from the field of R&D management over the last 43 years provides insight into the effect of changes in institutional context upon author productivity. Implications are then considered. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.