High research productivity in vertically undifferentiated higher education systems: Who are the top performers?
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Date
2018-03-10
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Springer
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Abstract
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 producemost of theworks and attract huge numbers of citations. Performance determines rewards, and small differences in talent translate into a disproportionate level of success, leading to inequalities inresources, 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 tinyminority of 10%of academics produces about half (44.7%) of all Polish publications (48.0% of publications in English and 57.2% of internationally coauthored publications). Themean research productivity of top performers acrossmajor 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 skewedwith 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 regressionmodels 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.
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Inequality in science, Publication productivity, Lotka’s square law, Stratification in science, Reward structure, Skewed distribution, Stars, Cumulative advantage, Poland, highly productive scientists, sociology of academic careers, Polish higher education
Citation
Scientometrics. 115(1): 415-462