Publication Rates in 192 Research Fields of the Hard Sciences

Bibliometricians are aware that the citation behavior of scientists varies across fields, and for this they carefully normalize citations by field. They are also aware of the different publication intensities across fields. This imposes that the research performance of a scientist must be compared with that of their colleagues in the same field. Every comparison of scientists in different fields should be preceded by the normalization of the performances, and the same holds for comparing multidisciplinary organizational units. If the Web of Science recognizes 251 subject categories, there should be a somewhat similar number of research fields for the classification of the scientists. The Italian academic system is quite unique in providing a classification of professors, into 370 fields, 192 of them in the hard sciences. In this work we measure the descriptive statistics on annual publication (full and fractional counting) by Italian academics in each of the 192 hard science fields. These statistics help recognize the extent of distortion from failing to normalize the research performance of scientists based in different fields. They could also serve as scaling factors for avoiding distortion in rankings, including in other nations.