Analysis of particle/particle-astro physics publications
For the past three years I have been trying to
figure out answers to the following sort of questions regarding
the publication impact of large collaborations in the fields of
particle physics, particle astro-physics, and cosmology:
- How well are the experiments at
the Large Hadron Collider doing in comparison to
previous generation of collider experiments, such as Tevatron and LEP,
and experiments in other areas such as neutrinos, flavor
physics, dark matter, cosmology/ dark energy,
heavy ion, gamma-ray telescopes, ... etc. ?
- How well is my experiment, CMS, doing in comparison to the competition ?
- Within the field of collider experiment, what is the relative impact
of major research topics (e.g., Higgs, Standard Model, Exotica,
Top quark, B-physics, Super-symmetry, Heavy ion, Forward/soft-QCD,
Physics object calibration, etc.) ?
- What is the relative impact of the publication of
experimental results vs phenomenology calculations/ Monte Carlo
generators ?
In order to answer these questions objectively in a
quantitative, matter-of-fact way, I decided to write a lightweight
package to perform statistical analysis
of Inspire HEP data, which maintains
a meticulous record of these publications.
The package is called "iCite" and is
written in python. It performs query on the Inspire HEP database to extract
useful information about the publications and their citation statistics.
It then goes on to make charts comparing performance of
collaborations in each specific field.
The query result can also be stored locally in
a text file for further analysis.
I chose H-index as
the most appropriate metric since it comes closest to measuring the
impact of one's publications, but one can easily change this to total
number of citations or average citation per article, etc.
The Git repository of the package is:
https://github.com/kalanand/iCite
Results from the analysis are shown below (as of April 2014).
