Indicator 10.3Publications by broad discipline and per eligible principal investigator, UC campuses, 2008
The number of faculty publications1 is a measure, imperfect, of faculty research productivity.2
The charts on the following page show faculty publications across three broad academic disciplines: health and life sciences, physical sciences and engineering, and social sciences and humanities. Some important caveats guide its interpretation and use.
Within a given academic discipline, differences in the level of faculty publications are due to a number of factors, among them the nature of scholarship in a given field, size of departments and the number of faculty at each campus working in a particular field. Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, for example, all have large medical schools and associated faculty and researchers, and accordingly show disproportionately high levels of publications in the health and life sciences.
Published outputs cannot be used to compare faculty research productivity across disciplines. While all academic disciplines strive for excellence, different disciplines have different standards of merit and validation in terms of types, frequency and venues for the dissemination of research. Also, the number of newly hired faculty and researchers can affect a campus's measure here, as it takes time for a new hire to publish articles.
Some disciplines favor shorter, multi-authored publications while other disciplines favor longer, sole-authored publications. Co-authorship, for example, is more common in the life and physical sciences, where credit is shared with a team of researchers, than in the social sciences and humanities, where papers tend to be sole-authored. Thus, faculty in the life and physical sciences may have more publications credited to them than faculty in the social sciences and humanities in part because of different publication norms.
Faculty in the social sciences and the humanities also publish books as well as scholarly articles; however, the 2008 SCOPUS database, from which the data for this Indicator are drawn, does not contain books. Thus, it underestimates faculty research contributions in the social sciences and humanities.
1 Faculty publications data come from SCOPUS, a database of abstracts and citations for scholarly journal articles. SCOPUS covers nearly 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers; it includes 16,500 peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical and medical and social science (including arts and humanities) fields. SCOPUS assigns each scholarly journal in its database to a particular academic discipline; articles appearing in a specific journal are considered to have been published in the academic discipline assigned to that journal.
2 Information on eligible principal investigators (PI) can be found in Indicator 10.2.