Recognizing Emigrants’ Scientific Achievement: Temporal Order, Social Stratification, and Type of Journal

Abstract

Although emigrant articles met no anomalous citation frequency in the field of nuclear physics if a sum over all periods is taken, there is a marked decline of the citation curve from 13.8% in 1926–1930 down to about 5.4% in 1931–1933. This means that of all the 1926–30 publications cited in the data base 13.8% were written or coauthored by emigrants, whereas of the cited papers published between 1931 and 1933 this is true for only 5.4%. Note that the figures in the following tables do not allow for any conclusions concerning the absolute numbers of articles published in the given years, or the distribution of published articles in the field for different years (except for the twenties, which were covered equally well by the sampling procedure), because the peaks depend on the temporal distribution of the source articles, i.e., on the chosen sampling periods, which were 1920–25, 1926–30, 1935, 1941, 1946/47. Thus the decline of citations in 1936; to give an example, does not reflect a drop in the number of publications in the field. This peculiarity of the distribution should not, however, affect the proportion between citations of emigrant and non-emigrant publications in any way.