How to find top authors with most papers in a particular journal Is there a good way to find out authors and the number of papers published for each author in a particular journal? I was just wondering who are the top authors for a journal and how many papers they have published.
Discipline-specific repositories or databases might work, depending on your field - if 95% of papers in a given journal end up in DBLP or PubMed, then working through those tools will give you a good answer. However, it won't work for multidisciplinary journals (where some papers are in the repository and some aren't), or ones which aren't in that field at all.

For best effect, you need something which indexes on a per-journal basis; in other words, the database includes all the papers (or 'all since a given date') if it includes any at all. The two major commercial databases (Scopus &amp; Web of Science) both do this.

Web of Science:

The most popular bibliographic database but not the most powerful.


On the general search, select 'publication name' and put in your journal title - it should suggest a matching entry from the index, or you can go through the index to pick one.
You may want to add a date filter at this point (if your journal is long-lived)
Run the search and glory in the thousands of results
In the left column, click the drop-down for filtering by authors, then 'refine'
Bingo - the top hundred authors, by number of records (though actual numbers are not shown)
You can download the data to play with it, but only in batches of 500 at a time


InCites:

InCites is an add-on package for Web of Science. I'm pretty sure you can get a more detailed report for a journal using this, but it's the weekend and I don't have my login details at home...

Scopus:

Never as popular as Web of Science, but more inclusive and you can do some very complex queries with it.


Select 'source title' in the standard search, and put in your title (no auto-suggestion here, but you can look through their index)
Again, add year filtering if appropriate
The left-hand column gives you a very quick summary of the top five authors with item counts, and if you click 'view more' in this box a couple of times you'll get a list of the top hundred with item counts. Like WoS, but better!
Alternatively, click 'analyse search results' and you'll get some pretty graphs; the same top hundred authors are available through this.
You can export up to 20,000 bibliographic records from a query through Scopus (as a flat CSV) if you want to do some further digging


Caveats

All of these tools are only as good as their author matching. If they think "Smith, J" and "Smith, J" are the same as a third "Smith, J" (or if they think that another is two different people because they publish in disparate journals) there's not much you can do. Author disambiguation is a work in process and some are better at it than others; generally speaking it's probably decent for recent papers and less good for records from the 1980s.