This is cool. As law nerds may know, @HeinOnline has a "Top 250" ranking of legal scholars based on citations. They just added a new listed metric: Avg citations per article. Just eyeballing it, there's a very interesting result: Pretty similar averages among scholars. (Thread).
If you look at the absolute numbers, such as journal citations, there are huge disparities. At the top #1 @CassSunstein has more than 26K journal citations. His colleague, @jciv, at #249, has just over 1K journal citations. But how much of that is high citations per article,
and how much of that is having lots of articles to cite? Looking at a few of the numbers on the list shows a surprisingly narrow range of average citations per article for those on the list: Somewhere around 40-90 average citations per article.
Some sample averages, with their overall citation rank:
#1, @CassSunstein: 86
#10, Akhil Amar: 79
#21, Judith Resnik: 57
#34, Doug Laycock: 53
#56, Pam Karlan: 41
#81, Rik Pildes: 76
#101, @RachelBarkow: 63
#125, David Shapiro: 86
#138, Ernie Young: 44
#154, David Strauss: 42
#1, @CassSunstein: 86
#10, Akhil Amar: 79
#21, Judith Resnik: 57
#34, Doug Laycock: 53
#56, Pam Karlan: 41
#81, Rik Pildes: 76
#101, @RachelBarkow: 63
#125, David Shapiro: 86
#138, Ernie Young: 44
#154, David Strauss: 42
To me, at least, that suggests that a perhaps-surprising amount of what overall citation rankings are measuring is productivity: Not just ability to put out papers that get cited, but the number of papers such scholars write. Kinda interesting, at least to me.
BTW, overall @HeinOnline "top 250" is here, with avg citation metrics on each home page at the links. home.heinonline.org/top_authors/
