On citation rates in earthquake engineering

The data on citations of 51 academics in earthquake engineering are analyzed to estimate their relative standing within the category of engineering, as used by HighlyCited.com of the Thomson Institute for Scientific Information. HighlyCited.com publishes names of up to 250 of the world's most cited researchers in each of 21 categories including life sciences, medicine, physical sciences, engineering and medical sciences. At present, there are no earthquake engineers in their category of engineering. In terms of an approximate metric used in this paper, citation threshold for engineering academics who work in related fields of mechanics and finite elements, and who are included in HiglyCited.com list, is about 6000 total citations. The most cited earthquake engineers in our sample have about half that many citations. It appears that the absence of earthquake engineers from the engineering category of HighlyCited.com is mainly the consequence of 2 facts, that (1) near 80% of journal papers in civil engineering are not cited within 5 years after publication, and (2) that the cohort of earthquake engineers is very small relative to the membership of all other engineering disciplines combined.