7 research outputs found
Comment: Citation Statistics
We discuss the paper "Citation Statistics" by the Joint Committee on
Quantitative Assessment of Research [arXiv:0910.3529]. In particular, we focus
on a necessary feature of "good" measures for ranking scientific authors: that
good measures must able to accurately distinguish between authors.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-STS285B the Statistical
Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
A quantitative analysis of measures of quality in science
Condensing the work of any academic scientist into a one-dimensional measure
of scientific quality is a difficult problem. Here, we employ Bayesian
statistics to analyze several different measures of quality. Specifically, we
determine each measure's ability to discriminate between scientific authors.
Using scaling arguments, we demonstrate that the best of these measures require
approximately 50 papers to draw conclusions regarding long term scientific
performance with usefully small statistical uncertainties. Further, the
approach described here permits the value-free (i.e., statistical) comparison
of scientists working in distinct areas of science.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, 4 table
Dynamics, correlations and phases of the micromaser
The micromaser possesses a variety of dynamical phase transitions
parametrized by the flux of atoms and the time-of-flight of the atom within the
cavity. We discuss how these phases may be revealed to an observer outside the
cavity using the long-time correlation length in the atomic beam. Some of the
phase transitions are not reflected in the average excitation level of the
outgoing atom, which is the commonly used observable. The correlation length is
directly related to the leading eigenvalue of the time evolution operator,
which we study in order to elucidate the phase structure. We find that as a
function of the time-of-flight the transition from the thermal to the maser
phase is characterized by a sharp peak in the correlation length. For longer
times-of-flight there is a transition to a phase where the correlation length
grows exponentially with the flux. We present a detailed numerical and
analytical treatment of the different phases and discuss the physics behind
them.Comment: 60 pages, 18 figure files, Latex + \special{} for the figures, (some
redundant figures are eliminated and others are changed