The effect of academic inbreeding on scientific effectiveness

Abstract

In academia, the term ''inbreeding'' refers to a situation wherein PhDs are employed in the very same institution that trained them during their doctoral studies. Academic inbreeding has a negative perception on the account that it damages both scientific effectiveness and productivity. In this article, the effect of inbreeding on scientific effectiveness is investigated through a case study. This problem is addressed by utilizing Hirsch index as a reliable metric of an academic's scientific productivity. Utilizing the dataset, constructed with academic performance indicators of individuals from the Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Departments, of the Turkish Technical Universities, we demonstrate that academic inbreeding has a negative impact on apparent scientific effectiveness through a negative binomial model. This model appears to be the most suitable one for the dataset which is a type of count data. We report chi-square statistics and likelihood ratio test for the parameter alpha. According to the chi-square statistics the model is significant as a whole. The incidence rate ratio for the variable ''inbreeding'' is estimated to be 0.11 and this ratio tells that, holding all the other factors constant, for the inbred faculty, the h-index is about 89% lower when compared to the noninbred faculty. Furthermore, there exists negative and statistically significant correlation with an individual's productivity and the percentage of inbred faculty members at the very same department. Excessive practice of inbreeding adversely affects the overall productivity. Decision makers are urged to limit this practice to a minimum in order to foster a vibrant research environment. Furthermore, it is also found that scientific productivity of an individual decreases towards the end of his scientific career.

The Impact of Publishing During PhD Studies on Career Research Publication, Visibility, and Collaborations

“…This analysis is complemented by an analysis of whether publishing during PhD studies results in a greater number of citations during the scientist's career. Citations are indicators of research output visibility-arguably, also of research quality-which are found to be correlated with publication counts (Bosquet and Combes 2013;Inanc and Tuncer 2011). It is critical to analyze citations because doing so allows us to measure the effect that publishing during one's PhD studies has on one's career visibility, success, and impact.…”

“…It also does so by using citations as key indicators of research performance (see Inanc and Tuncer 2011). Past publications and citations are known to contribute to successful grant applications (Van den Besselaar and Leydesdorff 2007), which scientists and academics use to produce further knowledge.…”

Academic inbreeding: local challenge, global problem

“…If the total number of all publications was taken into account, the difference was not so impressive, but the early analyses still proved lower productivity levels of inbred faculty members (Eells and Cleveland 1935). In later papers, most researchers (Hargens and Farr 1973;Dutton 1980;Eisenberg and Wells 2000;Horta et al 2007;Inanc and Tuncer 2011;Horta 2013) came to the same conclusions.…”

A Scientometric Evaluation of 50 Greek Science and Engineering University Departments using Google Scholar

“…Other issues such as academic inbreeding. [20] relation between state funding and performance, number and characteristics of doctorate students and their scientific output as well as relation between scholars' gender and salaries and performance could be closely monitored and explored. A useful extension of this work is to incorporate representative international departments in order to better monitor the scientific progress and examine whether it is calibrated to an international level.…”