Marek Kwiek had a seminar at Harvard University (Department of Economics) on February 27, 2026.

„Measuring Individual Productivity in Science. Top Performing Classes Across 38 OECD Countries”.

The seminar was part of the the „Economics of Science and Engineering” series coordinated by Richard B. Freeman from Harvard and NBER.

The seminar can be viewed here.

ABSTRACT:

This study examines persistence in research productivity across entire scientific careers. We track late-career scientists with at least 25 years of publishing (N = 320,564) across 16 STEMM and social science disciplines in 38 OECD countries over up to five decades, covering 79.42% of late-career scientists worldwide. We analyze mobility between decile-based productivity classes (bottom 10% to top 10%) across early-, mid-, and late-career stages using a longitudinal dataset built from Scopus raw data. The global science system is highly immobile: about half of top performers remain top performers, and about one-third of bottom performers remain bottom performers. Extreme upward or downward moves are rare (≈1% or less). Regression results indicate strong path dependence—the best predictor of being a top performer is having been a top performer earlier in the career. We also present a new approach to productivity: nonlinear Journal Prestige Normalized (NJPN) productivity which combines: (a) percentile-based normalization of journal prestige, (b) a convex x2.5 transformation that amplifies differences in the upper tail of the journal-prestige distribution, and (c) fractional authorship counting that corrects for the effects of coauthorship. Using Scopus data, we show that JPNP produces a strongly right-skewed yet realistic productivity distribution, identifies top performers more accurately than linear measures, and reduces the “noise” generated by low-prestige publications. The indicator improves cross-disciplinary comparability and aligns more closely with theoretical accounts of cumulative advantage, scientific elites, and prestige stratification.

SHORT BIO:

Marek Kwiek, professor and chairholder, UNESCO Chair in Institutional Research and Higher Education Policy, University of Poznan, Poland. A Visiting Researcher at the German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) in Berlin in 2022-2024. His research area is quantitative studies of science and sociology of science; and his current  focus is on women in science, social stratification in science, and global academic elites. His recent articles are in “Higher Education”, “Studies in Higher Education”, “Quantitative Science Studies”, “Journal of Informetrics” and “Scientometrics”. His work on attrition and retention in global science was recently featured in “Nature News” (2024, 2025). An international expert for the European Commission, USAID, OECD,  World Bank, UNESCO, Council of Europe, and numerous national governments. An ordinary member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA) in Salzburg and Academia Europaea in London. He belongs to the top 2% of most highly cited researchers.

KEYWORDS: non-linear productivity; journal prestige normalization; OECD countries; top performers and bottom performers; decile-based productivity classes.

BACKGROUND PAPER: Marek Kwiek, Lukasz Szymula; Quantifying lifetime productivity changes: A longitudinal study of 320,000 late-career scientists. Quantitative Science Studies 2025; 6 1002–1038. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/QSS.a.16