TITLE: Information about publishing and citations 
QUESTION [32 upvotes]: In the context of some discussions we are having at my university, it has become evident that some statistical information regarding publishing practices in the various areas of mathematics would be necessary to proceed---you know, facts. In particular, I would be immensely happy to know 

are there measurable and measured differences in the number of papers published by people working in different areas (think PDEs v. Algebraic Geometry v. Number theory v. Combinatorics; top level MSC groups, say)? Here I mean papers published by individual authors as well as collectively.
are there measurable and measured differences in the number of citations gotten by papers in each area?; similar question about the out-degree in the citation digraph?
what is the time profile of the citations to a typical math paper (ideally, broken by area again), whereby I mean: how are the citations to papers typically distributed in time?

Google has pointed to studies in which such comparisons are made between different disciplines (mathematics v. chemistry, say) but not at all between areas of mathematics.

Can anyone point to such information?

I would love to get hold of MathSciNet's raw tables (only papers, authors, subject area, citations) which would allow me to compute such things... (MathSciNet only has citation information since 2000, and I do not really know if that would make a representative sample for all-time statistics. It would be very interesting to have these kind of information diachronically, but I don't expect that data to be available)

REPLY [7 votes]: In addition to the previous responses:

Pure mathematicians are a lot worse about citing each other than applied mathematicians. Similarly, the threshold for being an author is quite high (I have seen (many) papers by X where the key lemma was proved by Y. In applied math or CS there is no question that Y would be a coauthor).
In applied mathematics it is much more common for the advisor to be co-author on papers written by his/her grad students/postdocs (perhaps because of the greater influence of hard sciences, where the lab director's name appears on ALL papers published by people working in the lab. In the hard sciences the lab director's name is typically not the first, but in applied mathematics people use the pure math practice of alphabetical name order [at least more often than not]). This leads to a much greater average number of authors per paper, and so more publications and more citations. Unfortunately, the system is that a co-author of a five author paper gets full "citation credit".

If you look at the mathscinet list of top cited journals, you will see that the best pure math journals (Annals, Acta) are doing at best as well as some fairly generic applied math journals, which supports the above.