Marek Kwiek, Wojciech Roszka (2024). Once highly productive, forever highly productive? Full professors’ research productivity from a longitudinal perspective. Higher Education  87, 519–549. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01022-y. 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-023-01022-y#citeas or Here (PDF).

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.

References

Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C. A., & Caprasecca, A. (2009). The contribution of star scientists to overall sex differences in research productivity. Scientometrics, 81(1), 137–156.

Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C. A., & Di Costa, F. (2011). Research productivity: Are higher academic ranks more productive than lower ones? Scientometrics, 88(3), 915–928.

Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C. A., & Murgia, G. (2016). The combined effects of age and seniority on research performance of full professors. Science and Public Policy, 43(3), 301–319.

Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A., & Soldatenkova, A. (2017). How long do top scientists maintain their stardom? An analysis by region, gender and discipline: Evidence from Italy. Scientometrics 110, 867–877.

Agrawal, A., McHale, J., & Oettl, A. (2017). How stars matter: Recruiting and peer effects in evolutionary biology. Research Policy, 46(4), 853–867.

Aguinis, H., & O’Boyle, E. (2014). Star performers in twenty-first century organizations. Personnel Psychology, 67(2), 313–350.

Aksnes, D. W., Rørstad, K., Piro, F. N., & Sivertsen, G. (2011). Are female researchers less cited? A large-scale study of Norwegian researchers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(4), 628–636.

Allison, P. D., & Stewart, J. A. (1974). Productivity differences among scientists: Evidence for accumulative advantage. American Sociological Review, 39(4), 596–606.

Boekhout, H., van der Weijden, I., & Waltman, L. (2021). Gender differences in scientific careers: A large-scale bibliometric analysis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.12624

Börner, K. (2010). Atlas of Science. Visualizing What We Know. The MIT Press.

Carvalho, T. (2017). The study of the academic profession—Contributions from and to the sociology of professions. In J. Huisman & M. Tight (Eds.), Theory and method in higher education research (pp. 59–76). Emerald.

Cole, J. R., & Cole, S. (1973). Social stratification in science. University of Chicago Press.

Cortés, L. M., Mora-Valencia, A., & Perote, J. (2016). The productivity of top researchers: A semi-nonparametric approach. Scientometrics, 109(2), 891–915.

Costas, R., van Leeuwen, T. N., & Bordons, M. (2010). Self-citations at the meso and individual levels: Effects of different calculation methods. Scientometrics, 82, 517–537.

D’Angelo, C. A., & van Eck, N. J. (2020). Collecting large-scale publication data at the level of individual researchers: A practical proposal for author name disambiguation. Scientometrics, 123, 883–907.

DiPrete, T. A., & Eirich, G. M. (2006). Cumulative advantage as a mechanism for inequality: A review of theoretical and empirical developments. Annual Review of Sociology, 32(1), 271–297.

Fox, M. F. (1983). Publication productivity among scientists: A critical review. Social Studies of Science, 13(2), 285–305.

Fox, M. F. (2020). Gender, science, and academic rank: Key issues and approaches. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(3), 1001–1006.

Fox, M. F., & Mohapatra, S. (2007). Social-organizational characteristics of work and publication productivity among academic scientists in doctoral-granting departments. Journal of Higher Education, 78(5), 542–571.

Fox, M. F., & Nikivincze, I. (2021). Being highly prolific in academic science: Characteristics of individuals and their departments. Higher Education, 81, 1237–1255.

GUS. (2022). Higher education and its finances in 2021. Main Statistical Office of Poland.

Habicht, I.M., Lutter, M. & Schröder (2022). Gender differences in the determinants of becoming a professor in Germany. An event history analysis of academic psychologists from 1980 to 2019. Research Policy. 51(6), 104506.

Heckman, J. J., & Moktan, S. (2018). Publishing and promotion in economics. The tyranny of the top five. NBER (Working Paper 25093).

Hermanowicz, J. (2012). The sociology of academic careers: Problems and prospects. In J. C. Smart & M. B. Paulsen (Eds.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research 27 (pp. 207–248).

Hirsch, F. (1976). Social limits to growth. Harvard University Press.

Katz, D. A. (1973). Faculty salaries, promotions, and productivity at a large university. American Economic Review, 63(3), 469–477.

Kolesnikov, S., Fukumoto, E., & Bozeman, B. (2018). Researchers’ risk-smoothing publication strategies: Is productivity the enemy of impact? Scientometrics, 116(3), 1995–2017.

Kwiek, M. (2015). Academic generations and academic work: Patterns of attitudes, behaviors and research productivity of Polish academics after 1989. Studies in Higher Education, 40(8), 1354–1376.

Kwiek, M. (2016). The European research elite: A cross-national study of highly productive academics across 11 European systems. Higher Education, 71(3), 379-397.

Kwiek, M. (2018). High research productivity in vertically undifferentiated higher education systems: Who are the top performers? Scientometrics, 115(1), 415–462.

Kwiek, M. (2019). Changing European academics. A comparative study of social stratification, work patterns and research productivity. London and New York: Routledge.

Kwiek, M. (2020). Internationalists and locals: International research collaboration in a resource-poor system. Scientometrics, 124, 57–105.

Kwiek, M., & Roszka, W. (2021a). Gender disparities in international research collaboration: A large-scale bibliometric study of 25,000 university professors. Journal of Economic Surveys. Vol. 35(5), 1344-1388. doi: 10.1111/joes.12395

Kwiek, M., Roszka, W. (2021b). Gender-based homophily in research: A large-scale study of man-woman collaboration. Journal of Informetrics, 15(3), article 101171. 1–38.

Kwiek, M., Roszka, W. (2022a). Are female scientists less inclined to publish alone? The gender solo research gap. Scientometrics, 127, 1697–1735.

Kwiek, M., Roszka, W. (2022b). Academic vs. biological age in research on academic careers: a large-scale study with implications for scientifically developing systems. Scientometrics, online first: April 9, 2022:

Kyvik, S. (1990). Age and scientific productivity: Differences between fields of learning. Higher Education, 19, 37–55.

Latour B. & Woolgar S. (1986) Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press.

Lerchenmueller, M. J., & Sorenson, O. (2018). The gender gap in early career transitions in the life sciences. Research Policy, 47(6), 1007–1017.

Lutter, M., & Schröder, M. (2016). Who becomes a tenured professor, and why? Panel data evidence from German sociology, 1980–2013. Research Policy, 45(5), 999–1013.

Madison, G., & Fahlman, P. (2020). Sex differences in the number of scientific publications and citations when attaining the rank of professor in Sweden. Studies in Higher Education, 46(12), 2506–2527.

Marginson, S. (2014). University research: The social contribution of university research. In J. C. Shin & U. Teichler (Eds.), The future of the post-massified university at the crossroads (pp. 101–118). Springer International Publishing.

Marini, G., & Meschitti, V. (2018). The trench warfare of gender discrimination: Evidence from academic promotions to full professor in Italy. Scientometrics, 115(2), 989–1006.

Merton, R. K. (1973). The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investigations. University of Chicago Press.

Mihaljević-Brandt, H., Santamaría, L., & Tullney, M. (2016). The effect of gender in the publication patterns in mathematics. PLOS ONE, 11(10), e0165367.

Nygaard, L. P., Aksnes, D. W., & Piro, F. N. (2022). Identifying gender disparities in research performance: The importance of comparing apples with apples. Higher Education.   84, 1127–1142.

Piro, F. N., Rørstad, K., & Aksnes, D. W. (2016). How do prolific professors influence the citation impact of their university departments? Scientometrics, 107(3), 941–961.

Puuska, H.-M. (2010). Effects of scholar’s gender and professional position on publishing productivity in different publication types: Analysis of a Finnish university. Scientometrics, 82(2), 419–437.

Ruiz-Castillo, J., & Costas, R. (2014). The skewness of scientific productivity. Journal of Informetrics, 8(4), 917–934.

Salganik, M. J. (2018). Bit by bit. Social research in a digital age. Princeton University Press.

Selwyn, N. (2019). What is digital sociology? Polity Press.

Stephan, P. (2012). How economics shapes science. Harvard University Press.

Stephan, P. E., & Levin, S. G. (1992). Striking the mother lode in science: The importance of age, place, and time. Oxford University Press.

Sugimoto, C., & Larivière, V. (2018). Measuring research: What everyone needs to know. Oxford University Press.

Taylor, B. J., & Cantwell, B. (2019). Unequal higher education: Wealth, status, and student opportunity. Rutgers University Press.

Weinberger, M., & Zhitomirsky-Geffet, M. (2021). Diversity of success: Measuring the scholarly performance diversity of tenured professors in Israeli academia. Scientometrics, 126, 2931–2970.

Xie, Y. (2014). ‘Undemocracy’: Inequalities in science. Science, 344(6186), 809–810.

Yair, G., Gueta, N., & Davidovitch, N. (2017). The law of limited excellence: Publication productivity of Israel Prize laureates in the life and exact sciences. Scientometrics, 113(1), 299–311.

Yin, Z., & Zhi, Q. (2017). Dancing with the academic elite: A promotion or hindrance of research production? Scientometrics, 110(1), 17–41.

Yuret, T. (2018). Path to success: An analysis of US educated elite academics in the United States. Scientometrics, 117, 105–121.

Zuckerman, H. (1988). The sociology of science. In N. J. Smelser (Ed.), Handbook of sociology (pp. 511-574). Sage.

Marek Kwiek, Wojciech Roszka (2024). Once highly productive, forever highly productive? Full professors’ research productivity from a longitudinal perspective. Higher Education  87, 519–549. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01022-y. 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-023-01022-y#citeas or Here (PDF).

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.

References

 

Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C. A., & Caprasecca, A. (2009). The contribution of star scientists to overall sex differences in research productivity. Scientometrics, 81(1), 137–156.

Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C. A., & Di Costa, F. (2011). Research productivity: Are higher academic ranks more productive than lower ones? Scientometrics, 88(3), 915–928.

Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C. A., & Murgia, G. (2016). The combined effects of age and seniority on research performance of full professors. Science and Public Policy, 43(3), 301–319.

Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A., & Soldatenkova, A. (2017). How long do top scientists maintain their stardom? An analysis by region, gender and discipline: Evidence from Italy. Scientometrics 110, 867–877.

Agrawal, A., McHale, J., & Oettl, A. (2017). How stars matter: Recruiting and peer effects in evolutionary biology. Research Policy, 46(4), 853–867.

Aguinis, H., & O’Boyle, E. (2014). Star performers in twenty-first century organizations. Personnel Psychology, 67(2), 313–350.

Aksnes, D. W., Rørstad, K., Piro, F. N., & Sivertsen, G. (2011). Are female researchers less cited? A large-scale study of Norwegian researchers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(4), 628–636.

Allison, P. D., & Stewart, J. A. (1974). Productivity differences among scientists: Evidence for accumulative advantage. American Sociological Review, 39(4), 596–606.

Boekhout, H., van der Weijden, I., & Waltman, L. (2021). Gender differences in scientific careers: A large-scale bibliometric analysis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.12624

Börner, K. (2010). Atlas of Science. Visualizing What We Know. The MIT Press.

Carvalho, T. (2017). The study of the academic profession—Contributions from and to the sociology of professions. In J. Huisman & M. Tight (Eds.), Theory and method in higher education research (pp. 59–76). Emerald.

Cole, J. R., & Cole, S. (1973). Social stratification in science. University of Chicago Press.

Cortés, L. M., Mora-Valencia, A., & Perote, J. (2016). The productivity of top researchers: A semi-nonparametric approach. Scientometrics, 109(2), 891–915.

Costas, R., van Leeuwen, T. N., & Bordons, M. (2010). Self-citations at the meso and individual levels: Effects of different calculation methods. Scientometrics, 82, 517–537.

D’Angelo, C. A., & van Eck, N. J. (2020). Collecting large-scale publication data at the level of individual researchers: A practical proposal for author name disambiguation. Scientometrics, 123, 883–907.

DiPrete, T. A., & Eirich, G. M. (2006). Cumulative advantage as a mechanism for inequality: A review of theoretical and empirical developments. Annual Review of Sociology, 32(1), 271–297.

Fox, M. F. (1983). Publication productivity among scientists: A critical review. Social Studies of Science, 13(2), 285–305.

Fox, M. F. (2020). Gender, science, and academic rank: Key issues and approaches. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(3), 1001–1006.

Fox, M. F., & Mohapatra, S. (2007). Social-organizational characteristics of work and publication productivity among academic scientists in doctoral-granting departments. Journal of Higher Education, 78(5), 542–571.

Fox, M. F., & Nikivincze, I. (2021). Being highly prolific in academic science: Characteristics of individuals and their departments. Higher Education, 81, 1237–1255.

GUS. (2022). Higher education and its finances in 2021. Main Statistical Office of Poland.

Habicht, I.M., Lutter, M. & Schröder (2022). Gender differences in the determinants of becoming a professor in Germany. An event history analysis of academic psychologists from 1980 to 2019. Research Policy. 51(6), 104506.

Heckman, J. J., & Moktan, S. (2018). Publishing and promotion in economics. The tyranny of the top five. NBER (Working Paper 25093).

Hermanowicz, J. (2012). The sociology of academic careers: Problems and prospects. In J. C. Smart & M. B. Paulsen (Eds.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research 27 (pp. 207–248).

Hirsch, F. (1976). Social limits to growth. Harvard University Press.

Katz, D. A. (1973). Faculty salaries, promotions, and productivity at a large university. American Economic Review, 63(3), 469–477.

Kolesnikov, S., Fukumoto, E., & Bozeman, B. (2018). Researchers’ risk-smoothing publication strategies: Is productivity the enemy of impact? Scientometrics, 116(3), 1995–2017.

Kwiek, M. (2015). Academic generations and academic work: Patterns of attitudes, behaviors and research productivity of Polish academics after 1989. Studies in Higher Education, 40(8), 1354–1376.

Kwiek, M. (2016). The European research elite: A cross-national study of highly productive academics across 11 European systems. Higher Education, 71(3), 379-397.

Kwiek, M. (2018). High research productivity in vertically undifferentiated higher education systems: Who are the top performers? Scientometrics, 115(1), 415–462.

Kwiek, M. (2019). Changing European academics. A comparative study of social stratification, work patterns and research productivity. London and New York: Routledge.

Kwiek, M. (2020). Internationalists and locals: International research collaboration in a resource-poor system. Scientometrics, 124, 57–105.

Kwiek, M., & Roszka, W. (2021a). Gender disparities in international research collaboration: A large-scale bibliometric study of 25,000 university professors. Journal of Economic Surveys. Vol. 35(5), 1344-1388. doi: 10.1111/joes.12395

Kwiek, M., Roszka, W. (2021b). Gender-based homophily in research: A large-scale study of man-woman collaboration. Journal of Informetrics, 15(3), article 101171. 1–38.

Kwiek, M., Roszka, W. (2022a). Are female scientists less inclined to publish alone? The gender solo research gap. Scientometrics, 127, 1697–1735.

Kwiek, M., Roszka, W. (2022b). Academic vs. biological age in research on academic careers: a large-scale study with implications for scientifically developing systems. Scientometrics, online first: April 9, 2022:

Kyvik, S. (1990). Age and scientific productivity: Differences between fields of learning. Higher Education, 19, 37–55.

Latour B. & Woolgar S. (1986) Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press.

Lerchenmueller, M. J., & Sorenson, O. (2018). The gender gap in early career transitions in the life sciences. Research Policy, 47(6), 1007–1017.

Lutter, M., & Schröder, M. (2016). Who becomes a tenured professor, and why? Panel data evidence from German sociology, 1980–2013. Research Policy, 45(5), 999–1013.

Madison, G., & Fahlman, P. (2020). Sex differences in the number of scientific publications and citations when attaining the rank of professor in Sweden. Studies in Higher Education, 46(12), 2506–2527.

Marginson, S. (2014). University research: The social contribution of university research. In J. C. Shin & U. Teichler (Eds.), The future of the post-massified university at the crossroads (pp. 101–118). Springer International Publishing.

Marini, G., & Meschitti, V. (2018). The trench warfare of gender discrimination: Evidence from academic promotions to full professor in Italy. Scientometrics, 115(2), 989–1006.

Merton, R. K. (1973). The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investigations. University of Chicago Press.

Mihaljević-Brandt, H., Santamaría, L., & Tullney, M. (2016). The effect of gender in the publication patterns in mathematics. PLOS ONE, 11(10), e0165367.

Nygaard, L. P., Aksnes, D. W., & Piro, F. N. (2022). Identifying gender disparities in research performance: The importance of comparing apples with apples. Higher Education.   84, 1127–1142.

Piro, F. N., Rørstad, K., & Aksnes, D. W. (2016). How do prolific professors influence the citation impact of their university departments? Scientometrics, 107(3), 941–961.

Puuska, H.-M. (2010). Effects of scholar’s gender and professional position on publishing productivity in different publication types: Analysis of a Finnish university. Scientometrics, 82(2), 419–437.

Ruiz-Castillo, J., & Costas, R. (2014). The skewness of scientific productivity. Journal of Informetrics, 8(4), 917–934.

Salganik, M. J. (2018). Bit by bit. Social research in a digital age. Princeton University Press.

Selwyn, N. (2019). What is digital sociology? Polity Press.

Stephan, P. (2012). How economics shapes science. Harvard University Press.

Stephan, P. E., & Levin, S. G. (1992). Striking the mother lode in science: The importance of age, place, and time. Oxford University Press.

Sugimoto, C., & Larivière, V. (2018). Measuring research: What everyone needs to know. Oxford University Press.

Taylor, B. J., & Cantwell, B. (2019). Unequal higher education: Wealth, status, and student opportunity. Rutgers University Press.

Weinberger, M., & Zhitomirsky-Geffet, M. (2021). Diversity of success: Measuring the scholarly performance diversity of tenured professors in Israeli academia. Scientometrics, 126, 2931–2970.

Xie, Y. (2014). ‘Undemocracy’: Inequalities in science. Science, 344(6186), 809–810.

Yair, G., Gueta, N., & Davidovitch, N. (2017). The law of limited excellence: Publication productivity of Israel Prize laureates in the life and exact sciences. Scientometrics, 113(1), 299–311.

Yin, Z., & Zhi, Q. (2017). Dancing with the academic elite: A promotion or hindrance of research production? Scientometrics, 110(1), 17–41.

Yuret, T. (2018). Path to success: An analysis of US educated elite academics in the United States. Scientometrics, 117, 105–121.

Zuckerman, H. (1988). The sociology of science. In N. J. Smelser (Ed.), Handbook of sociology (pp. 511-574). Sage.