Citations to Australian Astronomy: 5 and 10 Year Benchmarks

Expanding upon Pimbblet’s informative 2011 analysis of career h-indices for members of the Astronomical Society of Australia, we provide additional citation metrics which are geared to a) quantifying the current performance of b) all professional astronomers in Australia. We have trawled the staff web-pages of Australian Universities, Observatories and Research Organisations hosting professional astronomers, and identified 384 PhD-qualified, research-active, astronomers in the nation — 132 of these are not members of the Astronomical Society of Australia. Using the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, we provide the three following common metrics based on publications in the first decade of the 21 century (2001–2010): h-index, author-normalised citation count and lead-author citation count. We additionally present a somewhat more inclusive analysis, applicable for many early-career researchers, that is based on publications from 2006–2010. Histograms and percentiles, plus top-performer lists, are presented for each category. Finally, building on Hirsch’s empirical equation, we find that the (10-year) h-index and (10 year) total citation count T can be approximated by the relation h = (0.5 + √ T )/ √ 5 for h >∼ 5.