Researchers publishing monographs are more productive and more local‑oriented

Abstract

In this study, we investigate what share of researchers publish monographs across fields, gender and seniority. We acquired data from the Polish current research information system (POL-on) containing metadata of about 1,031,141 peer-reviewed publications from 67,415 Polish researchers, including 30,185 monographs from 2013 to 2016. The data are aggregated at the researcher level, which allows us to shed new light on publication patterns in all fields. We show that scholars who publish monographs also publish journal articles at the same time. This pattern is observed in all dimensions, i.e. research fields, gender and seniority. However, substantial differences between the fields are observed. Moreover, we show that researchers who publish monographs are also more productive in terms of the number of publications than researchers who did not publish any monographs. This result is independent of the publication counting method, i.e. fractional or whole counting. At the same time, scholars who publish monographs are more local-oriented in terms of the publication channels they choose.