An investigation on the skewness patterns and fractal nature of research productivity distributions at field and discipline level

Abramo, Giovanni; D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea; Soldatenkova, Anastasiia

doi:10.1016/j.joi.2017.02.001

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 19 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This result is consistent with recent findings by Yair et al ( 2017 : 5) who showed in a sample of Israel Prize laureates that the tail of excellence may behave as the entire productivity distribution. In a similar vein, Abramo et al ( 2017a : 334) found the same pattern in the Italian national research system: “research productivity distribution for all fields is highly skewed to the right, both at overall level and within the upper tail”. This is also the case in Poland.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

“…Instead, it follows a Paretian (power law) distribution (O’Boyle and Aguinis 2012 ). Distributions of different social phenomena—such as income, wealth, and prices—show “strong skewness with long tail on the right, implying inequality” (Abramo et al 2017a : 324). Academic knowledge production is not an exception because unproductive scientists work alongside ‘top researchers’ in academic units, universities, and national systems (Abramo et al 2013 ; Piro et al 2016 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

High research productivity in vertically undifferentiated higher education systems: Who are the top performers?

Kwiek¹

2018

Scientometrics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The growing scholarly interest in research top performers comes from the growing policy interest in research top performance itself. A question emerges: what makes someone a top performer? In this paper, the upper 10% of Polish academics in terms of research productivity are studied, and predictors of entering this class are sought. In the science system (and Poland follows global patterns), a small number of scholars produce most of the works and attract huge numbers of citations. Performance determines rewards, and small differences in talent translate into a disproportionate level of success, leading to inequalities in resources, research outcomes, and rewards. Top performers are studied here through a bivariate analysis of their working time distribution and their academic role orientation, as well as through a model approach. Odds ratio estimates with logistic regression of being highly productive Polish academics are presented. Consistently across major clusters of academic disciplines, the tiny minority of 10% of academics produces about half (44.7%) of all Polish publications (48.0% of publications in English and 57.2% of internationally co-authored publications). The mean research productivity of top performers across major clusters is on average 7.3 times higher than that of the other academics, and in terms of internationally co-authored publications, 12.07 times higher. High inequality was observed: the average research productivity distribution is highly skewed with a long tail on the right not only for all Polish academics but also for top performers. The class of top performers is as internally stratified as that of their lower-performing colleagues. Separate regression models for all academics, science, technology, engineering and mathematics academics, and social sciences and humanities academics are built based on a large national sample (2525 usable observations), and implications are discussed.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High research productivity in vertically undifferentiated higher education systems: Who are the top performers?

Kwiek¹

2018

Scientometrics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This result is consistent with recent findings by Yair et al (, p. 5), who showed that, in a sample of Israel Prize laureates, the tail of excellence may behave like the overall productivity distribution. Abramo et al identified the same pattern in the Italian national research system: ‘research productivity distribution for all fields is highly skewed to the right, both at overall level and within the upper tail’ (, p. 334), and this is the case right across Europe.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rather than a Gaussian (normal) distribution, individual performance in science tends to follow a Paretian (power law) distribution (O'Boyle & Aguinis, ). In general, social phenomena such as income, wealth and price show ‘strong skewness with long tail on the right, implying inequality’ (Abramo, D'Angelo, & Soldatenkova, , p. 324), and academic knowledge production is no exception (Kwiek, ).…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social stratification in Higher Education: What it means at the micro‐level of the individual academic scientist

Kwiek¹

2019

Higher Education Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The academic profession is internally divided as never before. This cross‐national comparative analysis of stratification in Higher Education is based on a sample of European academic scientists (N = 8,466) from universities in 11 countries. The analysis identifies three types of stratification: academic performance stratification, academic salary stratification, and international research stratification. This emergent stratification of the global scientific community is predominantly research‐based, and internationalisation in research is at its centre; prestige‐driven, internationally competitive, and central to academic recognition systems, research is the single most stratifying factor in Higher Education at the level of the individual scientist today. These stratification processes pull the various segments of the academic profession in different directions. The study analyses highly productive academics (‘research top performers’), highly paid academics (‘academic top earners’), and highly internationalised academics (‘research internationalists’) and explores the implications for individual scientists.

show abstract

“…CSS involves subdividing a population into classes on the basis of the distribution of a given variable. The CSS technique was developed by Schubert, Glänzel, and Braun (1987) and has been applied in many bibliometric studies (Glänzel & Schubert, 1988;Glänzel, 2011;Ruiz-Castillo & Costas, 2014;Abramo, D'Angelo, & Soldatenkova, 2017;Bornmann & Glänzel, 2017) for classification of the given unit (publications, journals, individual scientists, research groups, institutions, etc. ), in function of the value of the bibliometric indicator measured on those units.…”

Section: The Characteristic Scores and Scales Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing for universality of Mendeley readership distributions

D’Angelo

Russo

2019

Journal of Informetrics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Altmetrics promise useful support for assessing the impact of scientific works, including beyond the scholarly community and with very limited citation windows. Unfortunately, altmetrics scores are currently available only for recent articles and cannot be used as covariates in predicting long term impact of publications. However, the study of their statistical properties is a subject of evident interest to scientometricians. Applying the same approaches used in the literature to assess the universality of citation distributions, the intention here is to test whether the universal distribution also holds for Mendeley readerships. Results of the analysis carried out on a sample of publications randomly extracted from the Web of Science confirm that readerships seem to share similar shapes across fields and can be rescaled to a common and universal form. Such rescaling results as not particularly effective on the right tails. In other regions, rescaling causes a good collapse of field specific distributions, even for very recent publications.

show abstract

An investigation on the skewness patterns and fractal nature of research productivity distributions at field and discipline level

Cited by 17 publications

References 19 publications

High research productivity in vertically undifferentiated higher education systems: Who are the top performers?

High research productivity in vertically undifferentiated higher education systems: Who are the top performers?

Social stratification in Higher Education: What it means at the micro‐level of the individual academic scientist

Testing for universality of Mendeley readership distributions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About