The conundrum of research productivity: a study on sociologists in Italy

This paper aims to understand the influence of institutional and organisational embeddedness on research productivity of Italian sociologists. We looked at all records published by Italian sociologists in Scopus from 1973 to 2016 and reconstructed their co-authorship patterns. We built an individual productivity index by considering the number and type of records, the impact factor of journals in which these records were published and each record’s citations. We found that sociologists who co-authored more frequently with international authors were more productive and that having a stable group of co-authors had a positive effect on the number of publications but not on citations. We found that organisational embeddedness has a positive effect on productivity at the group level (i.e., sociologists working in the same institute), less at the individual level. We did not found any effect of the scientific disciplinary sectors, which are extremely influential administratively and politically for promotion and career in Italy. With all caveats due to several limitations of our analysis, our findings suggest that internationalisation and certain context-specific organisational settings could promote scientist productivity .