Damn, I should have been a mineralogist

From CNN Money, of all places, comes a list of the most highly cited authors in Geosciences, courtesy of Thomson Scientific.

Top Ten Highly Cited Authors in Geosciences, 1996-2007

Name	Institution	Department/Specialty	Total Number of Citations
Frank C. Hawthorne	University of Manitoba	Crystallography/Mineralogy	2,204
Roger Powell	University of Melbourne (Australia)	Metamorphic Geology
Charles W. Carlson	University of California, Berkeley	Space Physics	1,822
Timothy J.B. Holland	University of Cambridge	Petrology	1,592
Andre Balogh	Imperial College London	Space Physics	1,568
H. John B. Birks	University of Bergen (Norway)	Ecology/Palaeoecology	1,548
Peter C. Burns	University of Notre Dame	Mineralogy	1,414
Henri Reme	CNRS, CESR, Toulouse (France)	Space Science	1,335
Joel D. Grice	Canadian Museum of Nature	Mineralogy	1,330
Juhn G. Liou	Stanford University	Geology/Environmental	1,327

One thousand citations over a ten-year period means that, on average, two papers which cite these guys’ work come out every week. Whatever your misgivings about the way citations are used as a metric for academic performance, that’s pretty impressive, and for me, intimidating: within a month, everyone on this list has pretty much matched my entire career thus far. Ulp.
I was interested to note that fully 50% of these citation supermen are mineralogists and petrologists – the hardest of hard rock geologists. Clearly I picked the wrong subdiscipline (although in fact, I missed a lot of hard rock stuff while I was still flirting with Physics as an undergrad, so it wasn’t really a choice). Is there something about that particular field which makes it easier, relatively, to garner citations? Shorter, more self-contained projects, perhaps; or lots of big collaborations; or a field dominated with a few big guns or labs, with fingers in lots of crystallographic pies. It can’t be just that all the smartest and/or most productive geoscientists become petrologists…