Scientific publications of a medical school faculty

To characterize patterns of scientific productivity in a medical school faculty, the authors assessed the quantity and apparent scientific quality of publications by a large sample of the full-time faculty at Baylor College of Medicine. The apparent quality of an article in a given journal was taken to be the average extent to which articles in that journal are cited. Productivity varied greatly among the faculty members; a few prolific authors produced 10 times as much as the average of their colleagues, and a substantial fraction of the faculty published nothing in a four-year period. When productivity was related to length of academic career, two peaks of scientific accomplishment were noted. The first was for young faculty members whose relatively few publications were of high apparent quality. The second was for more mature faculty whose high productivity was attributable to more publications of less apparent quality.