On the relation between productivity and impact

The number of publications per person per year and the number of citations to published work per person per year were counted for a sample of 299 Australasian academic psychologists for the period 1970–1975. Ten per cent of the sample accounted for 36% of the publications and 10% of the sample for 60% of the citations. At the level of universities there was a relationship (r = .70) between productivity (publications) and impact (citations). Across the 242 individuals with at least one publication, there was no productivity-impact relationship (r = .10).