Analysis of research scholarship for academic staff at US ABET accredited mining engineering schools by publications, citations and h-index

Publications, citations and h-index are three quantitative measures of scholarly productivity commonly used to evaluate university academic staff members. The quantity and quality of an individual's publication record is often an integral part of promotion and tenure decisions as well as post-tenure notoriety and awards. In this study, the Scopus database was queried to provide information on the scholarly productivity of 83 mining engineering academic staff members at accredited mining engineering schools in the United States. The data retrieved in this study include the number of publications, number of citations and h-index, for each individual academic staff member. Data for individual academic staff members was then classified by academic level/rank, institution and primary research sub-discipline to produce meaningful comparative results. The data show that the average number of publications per academic increases from 4 to 22 to 49 for assistant professors, associate professors and professors, respectively. Citations (9-83-290) and h-index (1-3-6) follow similar trends. Further analysis indicates that mineral processing and mine electrical systems are the most highly cited sub-disciplines. When aggregated by academic institution, the data show that the productivity of academic staff is linked to Carnegie Research classification. Finally, the data show a clear Pareto tendency with the highest 20% of academic staff members contributing 80% of the overall citations.