Publication Rates of Pharmaceutical Scientists: Application of the Waring Distribution

The publication frequency characteristics of 1984 Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences reviewers were investigated to provide a perspective on the state of the pharmaceutical literature, its dynamics and some of its features. The average number of per capita total publications in 1984 was 3.56, with 26.9% of the reviewers not publishing at all during the year. The average number of per capita first-authorship publications in our survey was 1.17; the percentage of reviewers not publishing a paper as senior author increased to 50.4%. The so-called elite group of scientists--that is, the top group of scientists who publish 50% of the papers--consisted of 12.8% and 11.7% of the sample for total and senior-authored papers, respectively. Waring distributions were shown to adequately characterize the data. The conceptual scheme leading to the Waring distribution assumes three fundamental characteristics: (1) a "self-reproducing" property, viz., the rate of new entrants (potential publishing scientists) is proportional to community size; (2) a "cumulative advantage" or "success breeds success" property, viz., more highly published scientists; are more likely to publish their next article than are less-published scientists; and (3) a uniform "leakage" property, viz., all scientists, regardless of publication rates, have equal likelihood of dropping out of the publication community.