Science impact examined through citations: a case study from the National Spherical Torus Experiment

Scientific projects produce a collection of publications in journals as a product and record of the research. Citations of those articles are one measure of the impact of the particular topic of research. An analysis is performed on over twenty-five years of published work from the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX), a fusion energy experiment at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The papers can be separated into high, medium, and lower impact, based on citation rates, and analyzed by individual authors or by journal. Examining a single author's output can be insightful for an individual, but collectively no discernible difference is found between authors' first and subsequent papers' citation rates, nor broadly by authors' institutional affiliation. Certain journals are shown to contain a higher level of impactful publications than others, but the cause and effect is not determined. Finally, the topical areas highlighted by producing high impact science make sense from a scientific perspective, as they correlate with areas of unique contributions of NSTX to the fields of fusion energy and plasma physics. Overall this case study provides a method for using citation analysis to gain insights on scientific impact that can be applied to other large science projects as well.