Self-esteem,self-symbolizing,and academic recognition: behavioral evidence from curricula vitae

Scientometrics - To provide new evidence on the empirically challenging aspect of measuring self-esteem, we collect written CV content from over 500 influential economics scholars and use such...     

The trench warfare of gender discrimination: evidence from academic promotions to full professor in Italy

In this paper we aim to understand if gender makes a difference in the path to promotion to full professor in Italian universities, drawing on data from 2013 to 2016. The new promotion system pursuant Gelmini Law (210/2010) in Italy implies to go through two steps. First, they have to obtain the national ASN system (fit-for-the-role national filter), based on merit measured via bibliometric and non-bibliometric indicators. This step does not mean to get a position, it only means to be able to apply for it at institutional level. We believe that discrimination based on gender may happen especially at institutional level as in comparison to ASN there is less transparency and more autonomy at institutional level. It is also hypothesised that discrimination based on gender may differ according to the percentage of women already at full professor rank by disciplinary field. We investigate gender inequality using a binary variable (promoted or not promoted along 2013 until 2016) controlling by scientific productivity, normalised number of available vacancies, result of national research evaluation (VQR—department of candidate’s affiliation), age, current rank-and-file position. Multilevel logistic regression demonstrates that among those who obtained the ASN and at parity of other conditions, men have around 24% more probability to be promoted at parity of scientific production, which reveals a relevant gender discrimination. Our findings have implications on theory about inequality regimes and might serve to reflect on how to improve practices at institutional level.     

Research and innovation in higher education: empirical evidence from research and patenting in Brazil

Scientometrics - The encyclicals, also known as papal letters, are documents that have a profound influence on the Catholic Church and, as a result, on the West. This research seeks to explore the...     

The taxonomy of research collaboration in science and technology: evidence from mechanical research through probabilistic clustering analysis

This paper suggests an empirical framework to classify research collaboration activities with developed indicators that carry on a previous theoretical framework (Wagner [Science and Technology Policy for Development, Dialogues at the Interface, 2006]; Wagner et al. [Linking effectively: Learning lessons from successful collaboration in science and technology. DB-345-OSTP, 2002]) by employing the Gaussian mixture model, an advanced probabilistic clustering analysis. By further exploring the method upon a profound evidence-based reflection of actual phenomena, this paper also proposes an exploratory analysis to manage and evaluate research projects upon their differentiated classification in a preceding perspective of research collaboration and R&D management. In addition, the results show that international collaboration tends to be associated with more evenly committed collaboration, and that collaboration featuring a higher degree of funding or dispersed commitments generally results in larger outcomes than research clustered on the opposite side of the framework.     

Correction to: The trench warfare of gender discrimination: evidence from academic promotions to full professor in Italy

Scientometrics - In the original publication of the article, the second sentence of the Abstract and one of the references were incorrectly published. The correct version is given in this Correction.     

Academic research resources and academic quality: a cross-country analysis

Does devoting more academic research resources promote academic quality? This study aims to examine the influence of higher education R&D expenditure (HERD) on academic quality measured by the relative citation impact (RCI). Both the ordered Probit and panel data models are employed to implement the empirical estimation, the cross-country evidence suggests that an increase in academic R&D is positively related to academic quality. The further analyses on different academic disciplines show the HERD is more relevant to science publications. This finding is robust for various specifications.     

Sources of convergence and divergence in university research quality: evidence from the performance-based research funding system in New Zealand

Scientometrics - The introduction of performance-based research funding systems (PBRFS) in many countries has generated new information on their impacts. Recent research has considered whether such...     

Determinants and impacts of public agricultural research: product-level evidence from agricultural Kohsetsushi in Japan

Scientometrics - The public sector is an important source of agricultural research as many of the producers are individual farmers who cannot bear the cost of research and development. Public...     

Distribution of academic research funds: a case of Japanese national research grant

Drawing on a database of the competitive research funds in the Japanese academia, this study examines the distribution of research grants at the university and individual levels. The data indicates high inequality at the university level and slightly lower inequality at the individual level. Over the last three decades, the total grant budget has greatly increased and an increasing number of researchers have received the funds. Simultaneously, large-size grants have become more common and multiple awarding (i.e., one researcher receives more than one grant simultaneously) has become more frequent. These changes taken together, the level of inequality has not been changed substantially. The extent of inequality largely differs between scientific fields; especially high in basic natural sciences and relatively low in social sciences. A close examination of inequality over researchers’ career indicates different patterns of transition between fields and cohorts. Finally, both at the university and individual levels, the funding distribution is found more unequal than the distribution of publications as an output indicator.     

Beyond the basemap of science: mapping multiple structures in research portfolios: evidence from Hungary

As a novel tool for evaluating research competences of R&D actors, science overlay maps have recently been introduced in the scientometric literature, with associated measures for assessing the degree of diversification in research profiles. In this study, we continue the elaboration of this approach: based on science overlay maps (called here m-maps), a new type of map is introduced to reveal the competence structure of R&D institutions (i-maps). It is argued, that while m-maps represent the multidisciplinarity of research profiles, i-maps convey the extent of interdisciplinarity realized in them. Upon i-maps, a set of new measures are also proposed to quantify this feature. With these measures in hand, and also as a follow-up to our previous work, we apply these measures to a sample of Hungarian Research Institutions (HROs). Based on the obtained rankings, a principal component analysis is conducted to reveal main structural dimensions of researh portfolios (of HROs) covered by these measures. The position of HROs along these dimensions then allows us to draw a typology of organizations, according to various combinations of inter- and multidisciplinarity characteristic of their performance.     

Productivity of research groups-relation between citation analysis and reputation within research communities

In this paper I discuss the relation between widely used “Scientometric” measures and “reputation” of research groups within the scientific community. To this goal, I present the result of the detailed comparison of two research groups of theoretical astrophysics in post-world-war-2nd Japan. Though one of the two groups gained much higher reputation within the research community, we could not find much difference in the macroscopic indices such as the number of publications or the average citation index. The two groups showed similar scores for these macroscopic indices. This result suggests that widely used quantitative measures of the productivity do not give meaningful measure for the actual contribution of a research group to science.     

Variation in research collaboration patterns across academic ranks

The ability to activate and manage effective collaborations is becoming an 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 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.     

Emergent structures in faculty hiring networks,and the effects of mobility on academic performance

Scientometrics - This paper is about the South African job market for Ph.Ds. Ph.D. to first job mobility involves the preferences of both the hiring institution and the candidate. Both want to make...     

Assessing social capital in academic research teams: a measurement instrument proposal

Scientometrics - Open access mega journals (OAMJs) are broad and centralized open access journals that have come to represent profitable outlets for accumulating large volumes of research from...     

Neurocognitive evidence for test equity in an academic listening assessment

Behaviormetrika - The present study explored the potential of a new neurocognitive approach to test equity which integrates evidence from eye-tracking and functional near-infrared spectroscopy with...     

Multilevel analysis of academic publishing across disciplines: research preference,collaboration, and time on research

This study developed a multilevel model of academic publishing and tested the effects of several predictors on faculty publishing. In particular, the analysis paid special attention to faculty preference, time on research, research collaboration, and faculty discipline. The data we used for this study is the Changing Academic Professions (CAP) data which is the follow-up study of the Carnegie Foundation in 1992. The study found that faculty preference for research affects research publishing. In addition, faculty collaboration with international peers is a critical factor in academic publishing. While time spent on research is related to publishing, time spent on teaching does not have a conflicting effect on faculty research. In the institution level analysis, institutional goal-orientation and institutional mission were found to have effects on academic publishing. However, the principal determinants of academic publishing were found to lie at the individual faculty member level. For each of these findings, there are subtle differences by academic discipline.     

Gender differences in research productivity: A bibliometric analysis of the Italian academic system

The literature dedicated to the analysis of the difference in research productivity between the sexes tends to agree in indicating better performance for men. Through bibliometric examination of the entire population of research personnel working in the scientific-technological disciplines of Italian university system, this study confirms the presence of significant differences in productivity between men and women. The differences are, however, smaller than reported in a large part of the literature, confirming an ongoing tendency towards decline, and are also seen as more noticeable for quantitative performance indicators than other indicators. The gap between the sexes shows significant sectorial differences. In spite of the generally better performance of men, there are scientific sectors in which the performance of women does not prove to be inferior.