Marek Kwiek will hold a seminar at DZHW Berlin on June 27, 2023: “Persistence in High (and Low) Individual Research Productivity: A Longitudinal Study of 270,000 Scientists across 38 OECD Countries”.

The seminar will be hold at DZHW Berlin (Germany), German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), on June 27, 2023.

“Persistence in High (and Low) Individual Research Productivity: A Longitudinal Study of 270,000 Scientists across 38 OECD Countries”.

It will be based on current research with Dr. Wojciech Roszka (Polish study) and with Lukasz Szymula (global study), both from the CPPS Poznan Team.

The Polish study is available from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-023-01022-y#citeas as an Open Access publication.

Kwiek, M., Roszka, W. Once highly productive, forever highly productive? Full professors’ research productivity from a longitudinal perspective. Higher Education (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01022-y

Link here. PDF is available here.

Abstract

This longitudinal study explores persistence in research productivity at the individual level over academic lifetime: can highly productive scientists maintain relatively high levels of productivity. We examined academic careers of 2326 Polish full professors, including their lifetime biographical and publication histories. We studied their promotions and publications between promotions (79,027 articles) over a 40-year period across 14 science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) disciplines. We used prestige-normalized productivity in which more weight is given to articles in high-impact than in low-impact journals, recognizing the highly stratified nature of academic science. Our results show that half of the top productive assistant professors continued as top productive associate professors, and half of the top productive associate professors continued as top productive full professors (52.6% and 50.8%). Top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top transitions in productivity classes occurred only marginally. In logistic regression models, two powerful predictors of belonging to the top productivity class for full professors were being highly productive as assistant professors and as associate professors (increasing the odds, on average, by 179% and 361%). Neither gender nor age (biological or academic) emerged as statistically significant. Our findings have important implications for hiring policies: hiring high- and low-productivity scientists may have long-standing consequences for institutions and national science systems as academic scientists usually remain in the system for decades. The Observatory of Polish Science (100,000 scientists, 380,000 publications) and Scopus metadata on 935,167 Polish articles were used, showing the power of combining biographical registry data with structured Big Data in academic profession studies.

Biography

Professor Marek Kwiek is Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies and UNESCO Chair in Institutional Research and Higher Education Policy, AMU University of Poznan, Poland (www.cpp.amu.edu.pl). His research area is quantitative studies of science, with interests in globalization of science, global academic profession, and international research collaboration. He has published 230 papers and his recent monograph is Changing European Academics: A Comparative Study of Social Stratification, Work Patterns and Research Productivity (Routledge, 2019). His most recent invited seminars include Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Beijing and Hong Kong. He spent three years at North American universities, including the University of Virginia, UC Berkeley, National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC, and McGill University. He was also a Fulbright New Century Scholar in higher education (2007-2008) and a Professorial Visiting Fellow at the UCL Institute of Education, London (2012-2013). Currently (2022-2023), he is a Visiting Researcher at the German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), Berlin. A Principal Investigator or country Team Leader in 25 international higher education research projects. An ordinary member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA) in Salzburg and Academia Europaea in London. Contact: kwiekm@amu.edu.pl. Twitter: @Marek_Kwiek.