Departmental Contexts and Faculty Research Activity in Norway

The European research elite: a cross-national study of highly productive academics in 11 countries

“…The literature has identified a number of individual and institutional factors that influence research productivity, including the size of the department, disciplinary norms, reward and prestige systems, and individual-level psychological constructs such as a desire for the intrinsic rewards of puzzle-solving (see Leisyte and Dee 2012;Stephan and Levin 1992;Ramsden 1994;Teodorescu 2000, Kwiek 2015b). Faculty orientation toward research is generally believed to predict higher research productivity; as are the time spent on research, being a male academic, faculty collaboration, faculty academic training, years passed since PhD, as well as a cooperative climate and support at the institutional level (Porter and Umbach 2001;Katz and Martin 1997;Smeby and Try 2005;Lee and Bozeman 2005). The extreme differences in individual research productivity can be explained by a number of theories.…”

The Use of Bibliometrics to Measure Research Performance in Education Sciences

“…The "life cycle model" based on human capital theory, which models scientific production as a function of investments and human capital depreciation, postulates an inverted U-shaped correlation between (academic) age and research output. Empirical analysis mostly indicates a trend in keeping with this theory, according to which publication activity increases during the first years in academia and then gradually plateaus (Gonzalez-Brambila and Veloso 2007, Rauber and Ursprung 2008, van Ours 2009 or falls off (albeit with linear specifications of age; see Carayol and Matt 2006, Levin and Stephan 1991, Smeby and Try 2005. Alongside the human capital theory and depreciation over time of the human capital that drives research output, alternative explanations exist for the initial rise in the research output curve, followed by a plateau or actual decline.…”

“…Other theories posit a negative causal relationship: the incentive to do heavy-duty research may diminish as soon as the person has achieved the goal of acquiring a tenured position. However, the findings of the empirical studies conducted to date indicate an unmistakably positive correlation between professional category and research productivity (see Aaltojärvi et al 2008, Carayol and Matt 2006, Puuska 2010, Smeby and Try 2005, but do not give a clear indication of the direction of causality.…”

“…Gender: Various studies show that the publishing output of female researchers is lower than that of their male counterparts (Aaltojärvi et al 2008, Kyvik 1996, Larivière et al 2011, Puuska 2010, Rauber and Ursprung 2008, Smeby and Try 2005. In contrast, findings indicating positive effects of female gender on research output are rare (De Witte and Rogge 2010).…”

Organizational factors influencing scholarly performance: a multivariate study of biomedical research groups

“…This holds for communication with research groups abroad (e.g. Spangenberg et al 1990), as well as for international collaboration (Shin and Cummings 2010;Smeby and Try 2005). What is the causal relationship between collaboration and performance?…”