Publication rates in Mathematics Have there been any studies of publication rates in Mathematics? 
We are trying to construct a workload model for the Faculty of Science and Engineering at my institution. Part of this involves assigning a fixed number of "points" for each published paper. It seems that our colleagues in some of the sciences publish many more papers than we do in Mathematics, which leaves us asking for the number of points per paper to be far higher in Mathematics than elsewhere. But we need to be able to back up our impressions with facts. 
What I would like to do is to get some idea of how many papers one might expect a research mathematician to publish over, say, a five-year period. I recognize that there are a lot of problems here with the words "expect" and "research mathematician", not to mention problems with counting a 100-page paper on the same footing as a 5-page paper, or a paper in a "top" journal on the same footing as a paper in a not-so-top journal; I want to stay away from all those subjective and opinion-based issues. 
I would like to know whether there are any publically-available figures along the following lines: pick a university where faculty are expected to be engaged in research; find out how many publications each member of the Math Department has had over (say) a five-year period; publish the median, or some other measure of the distribution of the publication numbers (not the mean, which could be skewed by a small number of members publishing a large number of papers). 
I'm aware of the paper by Jerrold Grossman, Patterns of collaboration in mathematical research, SIAM News 35 (2002), but that's a study of all papers listed in Math Reviews, which includes people who published a paper or two and then left research mathematics for other fields. I'm really interested only in people who are employed by departments where publication in refereed journals is expected. 
 A: Here is the AMS culture statement on publication rates in mathematics. Even the best young mathematicians publish average of two or fewer articles per year.
A: My impression is that some (scientific) fields tend to have many papers with very large number of authors, while mathematics papers tend to have fewer authors. (Although the number of co-authored math papers has been increasing, which has been documented by MathSciNet data.) Anyway, if your university is still discussing this, you might point out that less credit should be given for an N-person paper than for a 1-person paper. So maybe the way to assign "points" to a paper is to give a person 1/N points for an N-author paper. That might help math. Or, since some level of collaboration is to be encouraged, maybe use a weighting system that decreases in some other way, e.g., an N-person paper gets 1+2/N points or 1+3/N points.
A similar weighting system could be assigned to citations, you get 1/N of a citation for each time your N-author paper is cited!
Note that this wouldn't require you to get data about publication rates in different fields. It's a fairness argument about the amount of effort each individual is putting into their papers.
A: The Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities, as part of its scoring process, does count publications per university per discipline.  However, when I looked at the current report for mathematics, I was unable to make sense of the number that they call "current articles," which presumably is some kind of measure of the number of papers published in the current year.  It sounds like you want something like the number of publications per faculty member per year for each university, and it's not obvious to me how to derive that from the numbers reported by the Performance Ranking.
The Performance Ranking relies on the Thomson Reuters "Essential Science Indicators" (ESI), so I assume you could go directly to ESI and compile the numbers you want.  However, I've never used ESI (they charge for their information) so I don't know how easy it is to extract the information you want.  In principle, though, the data should be there.
A: [extended comment not really answering the question, but an answer of sorts nonetheless; feel free to downvote!]
[edit: the thoughts below reflect my subjective opinion and are not meant to be interpreted as an expression of objective truth]
This question is, in a sense, flawed. You are asking about studies of a certain number $X$. Taken on its own this may be a reasonable question; the problem is that your stated motivation for why you are interested in $X$ is that you would like to (or your university would like to, and you seem willing to go along with it) use $X$ in a way that many reasonable mathematicians would agree is not just useless, but is in fact extremely harmful. How can anyone answer this with a straight face? Personally I would not answer even if I knew of such a study! There may be valid reasons to study $X$ and to be interested in it, but the motivation given for the question completely undermines the discussion.
With that said, it's important to emphasize that even across different areas within mathematics, there is a very large variation in


*

*$X=\,$the average rate of publication for a mathematician working in that area;

*$Y=\,$the average length of a publication;

*$Z=\,$the average number of coauthors of a paper;

*$W=\,$the average quality and impact of a paper (which are of course vaguely defined notions which there is currently no agreed upon way to quantify).
By agreeing to have your Faculty of Science and Engineering use $X$ as the measure of anything without making any attempt to take into account $Y$ and $Z$, let alone the much more intangible and ultimately most important parameter $W$, you would be allowing your university to create a hugely distorted image of your and your colleagues' research output. The fact that there will be some normalization factor that would ostensibly bring mathematics on par with other disciplines is completely irrelevant. So, as I said, although I'm sure it was well-intentioned, the motivation for the question is fatally flawed in my opinion. It may be worth having a discussion about average publication rates in the context of how to measure the productivity of mathematicians and whether it's a good idea to try to do so, but that would be a separate question that would need to be phrased in those terms.
A: From an answer of mine on academia.stackexchange.com:

Italy introduced a few years ago a habilitation process which involves
  heavy bibliometric evaluation, and in the process they computed median
  values for all the professors in Italian universities for:
  
  
*
  
*number of papers published in 10 years
  
*citations per year
  
*a sort of normalized H-index: the number h such that the person has h papers with score >=h, where a paper published Y years ago with C
  citations has score 4C/Y. (more precisely defined here
  (Italian)
  and
  here).
  
  
  The medians are separate by discipline and academic role (associate
  and full professor only --- not for assistants, unfortunately). You
  can find them here:
  associate
full,
  and a legend for the codes of the scientific disciplines is
  here.
  The documents are in Italian, but you can google-translate them (or
  guess the meaning of most words, it's not too difficult for an English
  speaker).
For instance, in computer science (01/B1) the medians for an associate
  professor are
  
  
*
  
*10 journal papers / 10 years,
  
*9.15 citations / year
  
*"contemporary H-index" 5. 
  
  
  and for a full professor
  
  
*
  
*12 papers / 10 years
  
*14.8 citations / year
  
*"contemporary H-index" 6.
  
  
  The calculations are of course imperfect, but they are very
  interesting to browse and give an idea of how wildly these numbers
  vary across different fields. For instance, the typical professor in
  nuclear physics (02/A1) publishes 59.5 papers over 10 years and gets
  over 104 citations per year, while one in mathematical logic (01/A1)
  publishes 5 papers in 10 years and gets 1.74 citations per year.

A: Perhaps you will find this site useful to find data to support your cause. The data comes from the SCOPUS database. Here you can compare various subject areas in terms of number of papers and citations per paper. 
