Scientific productivity and academic promotion: a study on French and Italian physicists (original) (raw)
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2003
In the economics of science framework, many empirical studies have e xhibited the persistence of the productivity hierarchies over the life cycle for a cohort of academic scientists. In this paper, we identify rewards in science which may contribute to this persistence and assess their impact on researcher's productivity relative to the influence of individual observed variables (age, gender and education). We have built an unique panel database that concerns French physicists over 1980-1997 and estimate an econometric model that controls for individual unobserved variables and allows time- stable variables. It is an issue for science policy, since the two effects - that of the rewards variables and that of the individual observed variables- are c ontrolled with d ifferent tools The first effect depends on the incentive scheme at work in the scientific institution, and the second effect depends on the recruitment policy in academic research. We consider three measures of produc...
Determinants of Research Productivity: An Individual-level Lens
Foresight and STI Governance
T he continuous growth of investment in R&D in Russia and the world increases the demand for optimal allocation of public funds to support the most productive scientific performers. These are, however, hard to conceptualize and measure. First, we need to consider the nature of research activity itself and, second, we need to evaluate a number of factors that influence such activities at the national, institutional and individual levels. One of the key issues is motivation of academic personnel, who are considered the main producers of new knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse the employment characteristics of researchers, and develop adequate mechanisms to facilitate their scientific productivity. This paper aims to examine determinants of publication activity among doctorate holders employed in the academic sector in Russia. Data for the analysis was derived from a survey on the labour market for highly qualified R&D personnel conducted in 2010 by the HSE, within the framework of the OECD / UNESCO Institute for Statistics / Eurostat international project on Careers of Doctorate Holders (CDH). With the use of regression analysis,
Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 2007
The identification of age, cohort (vintage), and period (year) effects in a panel of individuals or other units is an old problem in the social sciences, but one that has not been much studied in the context of measuring researcher productivity. In the context of a semi-parametric model of productivity where these effects are assumed to enter in an additive manner, we present the conditions necessary to identify and test for the presence of the three effects. In particular we show that failure to specify precisely the conditions under which such a model is identified can lead to misleading conclusions about the productivity-age relationship. We illustrate our methods using data on the publications 1986-1997 by 465 French condensed matter physicists who were born between 1936 and 1960.
Scientometrics, 2016
We investigate the question of how long top scientists retain their stardom. We observe the research performance of all Italian professors in the sciences over three consecutive four-year periods, between 2001 and 2012. The top scientists of the first period are identified on the basis of research productivity, and their performance is then tracked through time. The analyses demonstrate that more than a third of the nation's top scientists maintain this status over the three consecutive periods, with higher shares occurring in the life sciences and lower ones in engineering. Compared to males, females are less likely to maintain top status. There are also regional differences, among which top status is less likely to survive in southern Italy than in the north. Finally we investigate the longevity of unproductive professors, and then check whether the career progress of the top and unproductive scientists is aligned with their respective performances. The results appear to have implications for national policies on academic recruitment and advancement.
Research productivity: Are higher academic ranks more productive than lower ones?
Scientometrics, 2011
This work analyses the links between individual research performance and academic rank. A typical bibliometric methodology is used to study the performance of all Italian university researchers active in the hard sciences, for the period 2004-2008. The objective is to characterize the performance of the ranks of full, associate and assistant professors, along various dimensions, in order to verify the existence of performance differences among the ranks in general and for single disciplines.
Crossing the hurdle: the determinants of individual scientific performance
Scientometrics, 2014
An original cross-sectional dataset referring to a medium-sized Italian university is implemented in order to analyze the determinants of scientific research production at individual level. The dataset includes 942 permanent researchers of various scientific sectors for a 3-year time-span (2008–2010). Three different indicators—based on the number of publications and/or citations—are considered as response variables. The corresponding distributions are highly skewed and display an excess of zero-valued observations. In this setting, the goodness-of-fit of several Poisson mixture regression models are explored by assuming an extensive set of explanatory variables. As to the personal observable characteristics of the researchers, the results emphasize the age effect and the gender productivity gap—as previously documented by existing studies. Analogously, the analysis confirms that productivity is strongly affected by the publication and citation practices adopted in different scientific disciplines. The empirical evidence on the connection between teaching and research activities suggests that no univocal substitution or complementarity thesis can be claimed: a major teaching load does not affect the odds to be a non-active researcher and does not significantly reduce the number of publications for active researchers. In addition, new evidence emerges on the effect of researchers administrative tasks—which seem to be negatively related with researcher’s productivity—and on the composition of departments. Researchers’ productivity is apparently enhanced by operating in department filled with more administrative and technical staff, and it is not significantly affected by the composition of the department in terms of senior/junior researchers.
Higher Education, 2024
This longitudinal study explores persistence in research productivity over time. We examine the trajectories of the academic careers of 2,326 current full professors in 14 STEMM disciplines, studying their lifetime biographical histories and publication histories. Every full professor is compared in terms of productivity classes (top, middle, bottom) with their peers at earlier career stages. We used prestige-normalized productivity in which more weight is given to articles in high-impact than in low-impact journals, recognizing the highly stratified nature of academic science. Our results show that membership in top productivity classes is to a large extent determined by being in these classes earlier. Half of the current top productive full professors belonged to top productivity classes throughout their academic careers. Half of the top productive assistant professors continued as top productive associate professors, and half of the top productive associate professors continued as top productive full professors (52.6% and 50.8%). Top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top transitions in productivity classes occurred marginally. The combination of biographical and demographic data with raw Scopus publication data from the past 50 years (N=1 million) made it possible to assign all full professors retrospective to different productivity, promotion age, and promotion speed classes. In logistic regression models, two powerful predictors of belonging to the top productivity class for full professors were being highly productive as assistant professors and as associate professors (increasing the odds by 180% and 360%). Neither gender nor age (biological or academic) emerged as statistically significant. Hiring both low-productivity and high-productivity scientists may have long-standing consequences for institutions and the national science system: after entering the system and achieving job stability, scientists in Poland (where attrition is low) usually remain in the system for years, if not decades.
The Impact of Research Collaboration on Scientific Productivityψ
Scientific collaboration often is viewed as a virtue, so much so that several public policies actively encourage scientific collaboration at both the individual and institutional levels. But few studies have actually examined the impacts of collaboration and fewer still have related collaboration patterns to publishing productivity. Based on data from 443 academic scientists, our research examines the effects of collaboration on scientists' productivity, measured in terms of publications. We examine publications productivity by two measures, numbers of scientific articles and books published and "fractional count," the number adjusted by number of co-authors.
Scientometrics, 2016
This paper analyzes the impact of several influencing factors on scientific production of researchers. Time related statistical models for the period of 1996 to 2010 are estimated to assess the impact of research funding and other determinant factors on the quantity and quality of the scientific output of individual funded researchers in Canadian natural sciences and engineering. Results confirm a positive impact of funding on the quantity and quality of the publications. In addition, the existence of the Matthew effect is partially confirmed such that the rich get richer. Although a positive relation between the career age and the rate of publications is observed, it is found that the career age negatively affects the quality of works. Moreover, the results suggest that young researchers who work in large teams are more likely to produce high quality publications. We also found that even though academic researchers produce higher quantity of papers it is the researchers with industrial affiliation whose work is of higher quality. Finally, we observed that strategic, targeted and high priority funding programs lead to higher quantity and quality of publications.