Changing Patterns of Publication Productivity: Accumulative Advantage or Institutional Isomorphism?

Dey, Eric L.; Milem, Jeffrey F.; Berger, Joseph B.

doi:10.2307/2673269

Cited by 86 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…The conventional wisdom is likely skewed by a focus on elite departments, as 8 of the top 10 computer science departments are private [26], but in fact, private institutions are distributed evenly across all ranks. Expanding this analysis to include lifetime publications increases the prestige-publication slope to 3.28 publications per 10-rank improvement in prestige but does not alter the non-significance of public/private status (p = 0.714, 0.346, two-tailed t-test).Past studies have also found that publication rates have increased over time [29,30]. However, prior to investigating whether changes in publication rates apply to computer science, we used the manually collected CV data to probe the extent of DBLP's coverage.…”

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confidence: 74%

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The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory

Way

Morgan

Clauset

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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A scientist may publish tens or hundreds of papers over a career, but these contributions are not evenly spaced in time. Sixty years of studies on career productivity patterns in a variety of fields suggest an intuitive and universal pattern: productivity tends to rise rapidly to an early peak and then gradually declines. Here, we test the universality of this conventional narrative by analyzing the structures of individual faculty productivity time series, constructed from over 200,000 publications and matched with hiring data for 2453 tenure-track faculty in all 205 Ph.D-granting computer science departments in the U.S. and Canada. Unlike prior studies, which considered only some faculty or some institutions, or lacked common career reference points, here we combine a large bibliographic dataset with comprehensive information on career transitions that covers an entire field of study. We show that the conventional narrative confidently describes only one fifth of faculty, regardless of department prestige or researcher gender, and the remaining four fifths of faculty exhibit a rich diversity of productivity patterns. To explain this diversity, we introduce a simple model of productivity trajectories, and explore correlations between its parameters and researcher covariates, showing that departmental prestige predicts overall individual productivity and the timing of the transition from first-to last-author publications. These results demonstrate the unpredictability of productivity over time, and open the door for new efforts to understand how environmental and individual factors shape scientific productivity. INTRODUCTIONScholarly publications serve as the primary mode of communication through which scientific knowledge is developed, discussed, and disseminated. The amount that an individual researcher contributes to this dialoguetheir scholarly productivity-thus serves as an important measure of the rate at which they contribute units of knowledge to the field, and this measure is known to influence the placement of graduates into faculty jobs [1], the likelihood of being granted tenure [2,3], and the ability to secure funding for future research [4].The trajectory of productivity over the course of a researcher's lifetime has been studied for at least 60 years, with the common observation being that a researcher's productivity rises rapidly to a peak and then slowly declines [5][6][7][8][9], which has inspired the construction of mechanistic models with a similar profile [7,[9][10][11][12]. These models have included factors like cognitive decline with age, career age, finite supplies of human capital, knowledge advantages conferred by recent education, as well as skill deficits among the young, among others, and have been supported by the observation that individual productivity curves feature both long-and medium-term fluctuations [12] and are not well described by even fourth-degree polynomial models [9]. Indeed, every study we found to date proposes or confirms a * samuel.way@colorado.edu † allison.morg...

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confidence: 74%

“…Past studies have also found that publication rates have increased over time [29,30]. However, prior to investigating whether changes in publication rates apply to computer science, we used the manually collected CV data to probe the extent of DBLP's coverage.…”

Section: General Trends In Productivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory

Way

Morgan

Clauset

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…His main conclusion is that scientific productivity is most important. Dey et al (1997) found accumulative advantages -thus supplying evidence for a Matthew effect among institutions (Merton 1968(Merton , 1988) -as well as institutional isomorphism in the productivity of institutions. Self-enforcing mechanisms can explain the accumulation of advantages in highly regarded departments: Talented persons are accepted at the best graduate schools, they prefer to work with eminent scholars at institutions with high reputation and receive additional training by their teachers (Crane 1965).…”

Section: Institutional Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Determinants of Success in University Careers: Findings from the German Academic Labor Market / Erfolgsfaktoren in der Wissenschaft – Ergebnisse aus einer Habilitiertenbefragung an deutschen Universitäten

Jungbauer-Gans

Groß

2013

Zeitschrift Für Soziologie

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Summary: What factors determine the chances of being appointed to a chair in Germany? We propose to derive hypotheses from discrimination theory, social and human capital theory, and the signaling approach. In a survey we sampled scholars from mathematics, law and sociology who had completed their Habilitation ("second book") from 1985 and 2005 at West German universities. A young age at the time of completion of the Habilitation is beneficial across all disciplines. In sociology, the number of publications included in the Science Citation Index is the most important factor in attaining a chair, and women are at an advantage when they face the same conditions as do men. In the field of law, parents' years of education have a significant impact on success, as has having a highly respected mentor. In mathematics, the chances of getting a professorship increase significantly with high occupational prestige of the parents, the share of time spent in research, the specialty of applied mathematics, or having a mentor with a high reputation. Keywords

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“…It is possible that they were compiled from expert opinion or from existing lists of other institutions. The latter exemplifies "institutional isomorphism," in which institutions tend to imitate others those to whom they aspire due to economic and professional pressure (Dey, Milem, & Berger, 1997).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Criteria for Evaluating Journals in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and the Life Sciences

Bracke

Weiner

Nixon

et al. 2012

ij-sotl

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The purpose of this paper was to identify existing criteria that may be considered in evaluating journals in the scholarship of teaching and learning in agriculture, natural resources, and the life sciences. This can assist faculty authors and evaluators of promotion and tenure cases to explain indicators of the quality of the publications. The commonly accepted criteria are: peer review; acceptance rate; longevity; open access availability; inclusion in indexing/abstracting services; citation analysis; and expert opinion. These data were collected for a representative set of journals which indicated that: acceptance rates for the journals varied widely; most of the journals existed for at least 10 years; most of the journals did not have an ISI impact factor or EigenfactorTM Score; the ERIC database was the predominant indexing resource; and there were no published lists of journals in these subjects compiled from expert opinion. KeywordsScholarship assessment, Evaluation of journals, Agriculture, Natural resources, Life sciences, Scholarship of teaching and learning Abstract The purpose of this paper was to identify existing criteria that may be considered in evaluating journals in the scholarship of teaching and learning in agriculture, natural resources, and the life sciences. This can assist faculty authors and evaluators of promotion and tenure cases to explain indicators of the quality of the publications. The commonly accepted criteria are: peer review; acceptance rate; longevity; open access availability; inclusion in indexing/abstracting services; citation analysis; and expert opinion. These data were collected for a representative set of journals which indicated that: acceptance rates for the journals varied widely; most of the journals existed for at least 10 years; most of the journals did not have an ISI impact factor or Eigenfactor TM Score; the ERIC database was the predominant indexing resource; and there were no published lists of journals in these subjects compiled from expert opinion. Creative Commons License

show abstract

Changing Patterns of Publication Productivity: Accumulative Advantage or Institutional Isomorphism?

Cited by 86 publications

References 20 publications

The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory

The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory

Determinants of Success in University Careers: Findings from the German Academic Labor Market / Erfolgsfaktoren in der Wissenschaft – Ergebnisse aus einer Habilitiertenbefragung an deutschen Universitäten

Criteria for Evaluating Journals in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and the Life Sciences

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