A comparative study of cross-domain research output and citations: Research impact cubes and binary citation frequencies

Across the various scientific domains, significant differences occur with respect to research publishing formats, frequencies and citing practices, the nature and organisation of research and the number and impact of a given domain's academic journals. Consequently, differences occur in the citations and h-indices of the researchers. This paper attempts to identify cross-domain differences using quantitative and qualitative measures. The study focuses on the relationships among citations, most-cited papers and h-indices across domains and for research group sizes. The analysis is based on the research output of approximately 10,000 researchers in Slovenia, of which we focus on 6536 researchers working in 284 research group programmes in 2008–2012.