Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment

Abstract

Faculty at prestigious institutions produce more scientific papers, receive more citations and scholarly awards, and are typically trained at more-prestigious institutions than faculty with less prestigious appointments. This imbalance is often attributed to a meritocratic system that sorts individuals into more-prestigious positions according to their reputation, past achievements, and potential for future scholarly impact. Here, we investigate the determinants of scholarly productivity and measure their dependence on past training and current work environments. To distinguish the effects of these environments, we apply a matched-pairs experimental design to career and productivity trajectories of 2,453 early-career faculty at all 205 PhD-granting computer science departments in the United States and Canada, who together account for over 200,000 publications and 7.4 million citations. Our results show that the prestige of faculty’s current work environment, not their training environment, drives their future scientific productivity, while current and past locations drive prominence. Furthermore, the characteristics of a work environment are more predictive of faculty productivity and impact than mechanisms representing preferential selection or retention of more-productive scholars by more-prestigious departments. These results identify an environmental mechanism for cumulative advantage, in which an individual’s past successes are “locked in” via placement into a more prestigious environment, which directly facilitates future success. The scientific productivity of early-career faculty is thus driven by where they work, rather than where they trained for their doctorate, indicating a limited role for doctoral prestige in predicting scientific contributions.

Health research capacity of professional and technical personnel in a first-class tertiary hospital in northwest China: multilevel repeated measurement, 2013–2017, a pilot study

“…Since participants who graduate from better universities will have better education and research resources and may carry this on to their working environments [47]; however, we found no correlation between graduate school and HRC. A study found that the training and work environments but not the prestige of their doctoral institution drove researcher productivity [48], similar to that observed herein. Degree and graduate school were often used as a measure of scientific capacity [49]; therefore, our results may provide a perspective for hospital administrators for what may be considered when bringing in talents and improving hospital research capacity.…”

Task specialization across research careers

“…The assessment of researchers has been under scrutiny for some time ( McKiernan et al, 2019 ; Moher et al, 2018 ; Way et al, 2019 ; Weingart, 2005 ). They are immersed in a reward system that evaluates them individually following uniform expectations of leadership and excellence ( Bol et al, 2018 ; Merton, 1968 ; Reskin, 1977 ).…”

Who’s writing Open Access (OA) articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D. granting institutions in the USA

“…Private institutions in the United States are often associated with greater prestige than their public counterparts, evidenced by the consistently higher rankings of American private institutions in national and global ranking schema (e.g., US News & World Report; Times Higher Education). Clauset et al (2015) found that increased institutional prestige is related to increased faculty production, and Way et al (2019) report that the prestige of a researcher's place of work, rather than the prestige of the doctoral program where they trained, has a positive effect on their scholarly productivity. Our data do not allow direct testing of doctoral program versus current workplace prestige, but our findings add "OA article authorships" to the growing list of scholarly productivity indicators that appear to increase with the prestige of a researcher's current institution.…”

“…The relatively new field of the science of science has provided valuable insights into the role of institutional prestige in knowledge production (Clauset et al, 2015;Way et al, 2019). As Way et al note, research on the science of science sometimes falsely "…assumes, implicitly if not explicitly, that meritocratic principles or mechanisms govern the production of knowledge."…”