New research project funded by the Ministry of Science (2013-2016).

“What Can Big Data Add to Academic Profession Studies? Theoretical models to practical applications”

The project combines social sciences and data science and assumes that new data sets and the possibilities of accessing them and their processing (digital era in higher education research and quantitative science research) create new opportunities for applied social research. Proposed research combining heterogeneous data sources at the scale of the Polish science system and at the scale of countries OECD research would have been impossible to carry out five years ago. In particular within the project will be global survey data (1 million surveys sent) can be combined with structured Big Data and combined survey data with bibliometric and administrative data (probabilistic methods and deterministic). The project proposes a radical change in the unit of analysis in the study of academic careers: not publication (and its characteristics), but the individual scientist (and his characteristics). A scientist has characteristics derived from integrated databases combining Big Data, national registers of scientists and institutional data on different levels. We are interested in aggregations at the level of scientists with individual characteristics, not at level of publications and their metadata. The research project is pioneering on a global scale: to conduct innovative staff research academic studies in Poland in the broad context of OECD countries, we use new methodologies and new sources primary data, posing new theoretical questions and seeking answers to traditional sociological questions academic careers based on the analysis of new empirical data generated by the project. Within project, we show the opportunities that open up for research in higher education and science in Poland structured Big Data (raw data from Scopus, Web of Science and POLON databases).