### Estimating the size of the hep-ph community

18Nov07

Just for fun: how big is the hep-ph community?

Let $N$ be the total number of researchers in the hep-ph community. This includes students/postdocs, faculty, and emeritii. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that students/postdocs, and older faculty don’t publish at an appreciable rate. Instead, let us assume that all of the arXiv’s e-prints come from young faculty.

So let us estimate that all of the e-prints are generated by approximately 1/3 of the community. (So that the community is evenly split between student/postdocs, young faculty, and old faculty.) Let’s say that young faculty produce, on the average, one unique e-print per month, or 1/4 of an e-print per week. By unique’ I mean that papers with multiple authors count as a paper for one of the authors, not all of them.

Thus in an average week, there should be $\frac{N}{3} \cdot \frac{1}{4}$ eprints on the hep-ph section of the arXiv.

Last week there were 66 papers, and so I estimate $N = 792$ researchers. Rounding up (because I feel like on the whole I was low-balling), I estimate on the order of 1000 total researchers in the hep-ph community.

For reference, SPIRES tells me that there’s about 3800 active researchers in hep-ph. To control for inactive names who aren’t listed as inactive,’ on can limit to PhDs granted after 1960. This number goes down to 1773.

That’s not bad for an order of magnitude estimate!

(My estimate is a little convoluted, but I just have no idea how much the average’ grad student or the average’ postdoc publishes, so I tried to avoid those numbers.)