History of Lattice Field Theory from a Statistical Perspective

Researchers working in lattice field theory constitute an established community since the early 1990s, and around the same time the online open-access e-print repository arXiv was created. The fact that this field has a specific arXiv section, hep-lat, which is comprehensively used, provides a unique opportunity for a statistical study of its evolution over the last three decades. We present data for the number of entries, \(E\) , published papers, \(P\) , and citations, \(C\) , in total and separated by nations. We compare them to six other arXiv sections (hep-ph, hep-th, gr-qc, nucl-th, quant-ph, cond-mat) and to two socio-economic indices of the nations involved: the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Education Index (EI). We present rankings, which are based either on the Hirsch Index H, or on the linear combination \(\Sigma = E + P + 0.05C\) . We consider both extensive and intensive national statistics, i.e., absolute and relative to the population or to the GDP.