Variation in research collaboration patterns across academic ranks

Abstract

The ability to activate and manage effective collaborations is becoming an\ud increasingly important criteria in policies on academic career advancement. The rise of such policies leads to development of indicators that permit measurement of the propensity to collaborate for academics of different ranks, and to examine the role of several variables in collaboration, first among these being the researchers’ disciplines. In this work we apply\ud an innovative bibliometric approach based on individual propensity for collaboration to measure the differences in propensity across academic ranks, by discipline and for choice of collaboration forms—intramural, extramural domestic and international. The analysis is based on the scientific production of Italian academics for the period 2006–2010, totaling over 200,000 publications indexed in Web of Science. It shows that assistant professors register a propensity for intramural collaboration that is clearly greater than for professors of higher ranks. Vice versa, the higher ranks, but not quite so clearly, register greater propensity to collaborate at the international level

The relationship among research productivity, research collaboration, and their determinants

“…Finally, academics of higher rank often take a greater advantage to the emergence of phenomena of "gift" authorship, above all from mentoring relationships (Bayer & Smart, 1991). Comparing academic ranks, full professors show the greatest propensity to collaborate at the international level (Abramo, D'Angelo & Murgia, 2014;Bozeman & Corley, 2004;Melkers & Kiopa, 2010), while the assistant professors at the intramural level, and the associate professors at the domestic level (Abramo, D'Angelo & Murgia, 2014). Academic rank could have also a negative impact on research productivity because the academics of higher rank have less time to devote to research activity, due to their greater teaching and service duties (Mishra & Smyth, 2013).…”

Authorship analysis of specialized vs diversified research output

“…In fact in the daily practice of scientific activity, "The outcome of an interaction is to a large extent dependent on the balancing of contradicting motivations accompanying the establishment of collaborations" (Mayrose & Freilich, 2015). The intensity with which these collaborations develop (intramural/extramural, domestic/international, intradisciplinary/interdisciplinary) varies on the basis of contextual and personal factors, such as gender (Bozeman & Gaughan, 2011;Abramo, D'Angelo, & Murgia, 2013a;Ozel, Kretschmer, & Kretschmer, 2014), age (van Rijnsoever & Hessels, 2011;Aschhoff & Grimpe, 2011;Abramo, D'Angelo, & Murgia, 2017), academic rank (Lee & Bozeman, 2005;Rivellini, Rizzi, & Zaccarin, 2006;Abramo, D'Angelo, & Murgia, 2014), the research discipline involved (Yoshikane & Kageura, 2004;Gazni, Sugimoto, & Didegah, 2012). Even within a single discipline there can be notable heterogeneity in the forms of activating collaboration, due to the different specializations involved (Piette & Ross, 1992;Newman, 2001;Moody, 2004;Abramo, D'Angelo & Murgia, 2013b).…”

International Collaboration Among Social Science Scholars: Opportunities to Bridge Institutional Goals of Internationalization with Faculty Research Agendas

“…120)." The differences in patterns of collaboration are dictated by the subject disciplines (Franceschet & Costantini, 2010;Abramo et al, 2014). Nevertheless, there is a lack of literature related to international scholarly collaboration in the social sciences.…”

“…To be precise, the term cross-national collaboration was used to indicate collaboration between scholars who are working in different nations. (Abramo, d'Angelo & Murgia, 2014). For the purpose of this research, the term cross-national collaboration was used interchangeably with the term international collaboration.…”

“…Internal collaborations are projects that are undertaken by colleagues that are at the same institution; domestic collaborations that entails colleagues at different institutions that are located in the same country and international collaboration that includes colleagues located at institutions in different countries. Other researchers categorize collaborations as intramural, extramural domestic collaboration and extramural international collaboration (Katz & Martin, 1997;Laudel, 2002;Abramo et al, 2014) Intramural collaborations are between colleagues within a department or institution while extramural collaborations are sub-classified as domestic and international.…”