Quantitative study on Australian academic science

Abstract

As at the end of 2009, 50 million scholarly papers were in existence, and changes in the global higher education sector are seeing this number grow rapidly. With the impact of university ranking schemes, dramatic changes have occurred in the academic publication system; both the number of publications, and the number of scholars, are increasing rapidly. In this research, we conduct a focused study on the quantitative relationships in Australian academic science. Sample data is selected from three institutions, representing three types of universities in Australia: a leading university, a middle-tier university, and a non-comprehensive university. For our analysis, bibliometric data for 32,056 scholars and 353,334 publications are downloaded. The results show that varying growth rates for scholars (5.6%, 6.1%, and 7.7%) and journal publications (6.7%, 7.4%, and 9.7%) for the leading university, the middle-tier university, and the non-comprehensive university respectively. We also evaluate how scholarly publications differ across these three Australian universities types from six aspects: average number of publications per scholar, percentage of first-authored publications, collaboration pattern, average SJR score of publishing journals, percentage of Quartile category of publishing journals, and average citation per publication. Lastly, we consider how the scholarship life-cycle varies in Australian universities in terms of publishing age, thus establishing the quantitative relationship between scholarship life-cycle and publishing performance in Australian universities.

All downhill from the PhD? The typical impact trajectory of U.S. academic careers

“…The overall decline agrees with a study of three social sciences in the U.S. (Sugimoto et al, 2016) but sharply contrasts with the increase in field normalized average citations after age 50 found in Quebec, Canada (Gingras et al, 2008) either because of country or language issues or the use of the arithmetic mean in the latter study. The overall decline also contrasts with the midcareer average citation peak in Australia, although this data was not field normalized (Gu & Blackmore, 2017). As a previous study has shown different career citation patterns in some respects for different disciplines in the United States (Kolesnikov, Fukumoto, & Bozeman, 2018), the overall decreasing trend found here may well not apply to all U.S. fields.…”

Is the German Academic Profession on Metrification Autopilot? A Study of 25 Years of Publication Outputs

“…In other disciplinary fields MPR becomes effective through auto-metrification and peer pressure (see also Flink and Simon 2014). Future research with larger datasets and comparisons between countries with a weak and a strong metric culture are needed to elaborate the mechanisms further, for example in relation to accountability (e.g., Hammarfelt and de Rijcke 2015) and the impact of university ranking schemes (e.g., Gu and Blackmore 2017).…”

Domestic researchers with longer careers generate higher average citation impact but it does not increase over time

“…Although career trajectories for domestic or national researchers have been investigated for the USA (Thelwall, & Fairclough, 2020), and another study has used different methods with a similar goal for Australia (Gu & Blackmore, 2017) and worldwide career impact changes have been reported as part of a study of productivity (Larivière & Costas, 2016), this is apparently the first internationally comparative longitudinal career impact study using reasonably comprehensive journal article data. The focus is on the Scopus-indexed publications of domestic researchers for pragmatic reasons.…”