IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v114y2018i3d10.1007_s11192-017-2606-5.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Aliakbar Akbaritabar

    (Universita degli Studi di Brescia)

  • Niccolò Casnici

    (Universita degli Studi di Brescia)

  • Flaminio Squazzoni

    (Universita degli Studi di Brescia)

Abstract

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 .

Suggested Citation

  • Aliakbar Akbaritabar & Niccolò Casnici & Flaminio Squazzoni, 2018. "The conundrum of research productivity: a study on sociologists in Italy," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(3), pages 859-882, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:114:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-017-2606-5
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-017-2606-5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-017-2606-5
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-017-2606-5?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Azoulay, Pierre & Ganguli, Ina & Graff Zivin, Joshua, 2017. "The mobility of elite life scientists: Professional and personal determinants," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 46(3), pages 573-590.
    2. Elisa Bellotti & Luka Kronegger & Luigi Guadalupi, 2016. "The evolution of research collaboration within and across disciplines in Italian Academia," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(2), pages 783-811, November.
    3. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D'Angelo & Flavia Di Costa, 2008. "Assessment of sectoral aggregation distortion in research productivity measurements," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 17(2), pages 111-121, June.
    4. Abramo, Giovanni & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea & Rosati, Francesco, 2016. "A methodology to measure the effectiveness of academic recruitment and turnover," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 31-42.
    5. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo, 2011. "Evaluating research: from informed peer review to bibliometrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 87(3), pages 499-514, June.
    6. J. E. Hirsch, 2010. "An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output that takes into account the effect of multiple coauthorship," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 85(3), pages 741-754, December.
    7. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo, 2014. "How do you define and measure research productivity?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1129-1144, November.
    8. Anton J. Nederhof, 2006. "Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the Social Sciences and the Humanities: A Review," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 66(1), pages 81-100, January.
    9. Pablo D. Batista & Mônica G. Campiteli & Osame Kinouchi, 2006. "Is it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 68(1), pages 179-189, July.
    10. Halevi, Gali & Moed, Henk & Bar-Ilan, Judit, 2017. "Suitability of Google Scholar as a source of scientific information and as a source of data for scientific evaluation—Review of the Literature," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 823-834.
    11. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo, 2011. "National-scale research performance assessment at the individual level," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 86(2), pages 347-364, February.
    12. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Alessandro Caprasecca, 2009. "Gender differences in research productivity: A bibliometric analysis of the Italian academic system," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 79(3), pages 517-539, June.
    13. Whitley, Richard, 2003. "Competition and pluralism in the public sciences: the impact of institutional frameworks on the organisation of academic science," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 32(6), pages 1015-1029, June.
    14. Alberto Pepe & Michael J Kurtz, 2012. "A Measure of Total Research Impact Independent of Time and Discipline," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(11), pages 1-7, November.
    15. Beerkens, Maarja, 2013. "Facts and fads in academic research management: The effect of management practices on research productivity in Australia," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 42(9), pages 1679-1693.
    16. Konstantinos Chatzimichael & Pantelis Kalaitzidakis & Vangelis Tzouvelekas, 2017. "Measuring the publishing productivity of economics departments in Europe," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(2), pages 889-908, November.
    17. Berlemann, Michael & Haucap, Justus, 2015. "Which factors drive the decision to opt out of individual research rankings? An empirical study of academic resistance to change," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 44(5), pages 1108-1115.
    18. Katz, J. Sylvan & Martin, Ben R., 1997. "What is research collaboration?," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 26(1), pages 1-18, March.
    19. Alberto Baccini & Giuseppe De Nicolao, 2016. "Do they agree? Bibliometric evaluation versus informed peer review in the Italian research assessment exercise," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 108(3), pages 1651-1671, September.
    20. Jung, Jiwon & Bozeman, Barry & Gaughan, Monica, 2017. "Impact of research collaboration cosmopolitanism on job satisfaction," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 46(10), pages 1863-1872.
    21. Agrawal, Ajay & McHale, John & Oettl, Alexander, 2017. "How stars matter: Recruiting and peer effects in evolutionary biology," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 46(4), pages 853-867.
    22. Abramo, Giovanni & Cicero, Tindaro & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea, 2013. "Individual research performance: A proposal for comparing apples to oranges," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 528-539.
    23. Bates, Douglas & Mächler, Martin & Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steve, 2015. "Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 67(i01).
    24. Lokman I. Meho & Kiduk Yang, 2007. "Impact of data sources on citation counts and rankings of LIS faculty: Web of science versus scopus and google scholar," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 58(13), pages 2105-2125, November.
    25. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Flavia Costa, 2011. "Research productivity: Are higher academic ranks more productive than lower ones?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 88(3), pages 915-928, September.
    26. Geuna, Aldo & Piolatto, Matteo, 2016. "Research assessment in the UK and Italy: Costly and difficult, but probably worth it (at least for a while)," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 45(1), pages 260-271.
    27. Sarah de Rijcke & Paul F. Wouters & Alex D. Rushforth & Thomas P. Franssen & Björn Hammarfelt, 2016. "Evaluation practices and effects of indicator use—a literature review," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 25(2), pages 161-169.
    28. Opthof, Tobias & Leydesdorff, Loet, 2010. "Caveats for the journal and field normalizations in the CWTS (“Leiden”) evaluations of research performance," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 4(3), pages 423-430.
    29. Loet Leydesdorff & Han Woo Park & Caroline Wagner, 2014. "International coauthorship relations in the Social Sciences Citation Index: Is internationalization leading the Network?," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 65(10), pages 2111-2126, October.
    30. Katarina Prpić, 2002. "Gender and productivity differentials in science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 55(1), pages 27-58, September.
    31. repec:dau:papers:123456789/1095 is not listed on IDEAS
    32. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Francesco Rosati, 2016. "The north–south divide in the Italian higher education system," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 2093-2117, December.
    33. Koen Jonkers & Robert Tijssen, 2008. "Chinese researchers returning home: Impacts of international mobility on research collaboration and scientific productivity," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 77(2), pages 309-333, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wu, Jiang & Ou, Guiyan & Liu, Xiaohui & Dong, Ke, 2022. "How does academic education background affect top researchers’ performance? Evidence from the field of artificial intelligence," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2).
    2. Aliakbar Akbaritabar & Andrés F. Castro Torres & Vincent Larivière, 2023. "A global perspective on the social structure of science," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2023-029, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    3. Aliakbar Akbaritabar & Vincent Antonio Traag & Alberto Caimo & Flaminio Squazzoni, 2020. "Italian sociologists: a community of disconnected groups," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(3), pages 2361-2382, September.
    4. Balázs Győrffy & Gyöngyi Csuka & Péter Herman & Ádám Török, 2020. "Is there a golden age in publication activity?—an analysis of age-related scholarly performance across all scientific disciplines," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(2), pages 1081-1097, August.
    5. Yu-Wei Chang, 2021. "Characteristics of high research performance authors in the field of library and information science and those of their articles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(4), pages 3373-3391, April.
    6. Balázs Győrffy & Andrea Magda Nagy & Péter Herman & Ádám Török, 2018. "Factors influencing the scientific performance of Momentum grant holders: an evaluation of the first 117 research groups," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 117(1), pages 409-426, October.
    7. João M. Santos & Hugo Horta & Huan Li, 2022. "Are the strategic research agendas of researchers in the social sciences determinants of research productivity?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(7), pages 3719-3747, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Waltman, Ludo, 2016. "A review of the literature on citation impact indicators," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 365-391.
    2. Aliakbar Akbaritabar & Vincent Antonio Traag & Alberto Caimo & Flaminio Squazzoni, 2020. "Italian sociologists: a community of disconnected groups," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(3), pages 2361-2382, September.
    3. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo, 2014. "How do you define and measure research productivity?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1129-1144, November.
    4. Mingers, John & Leydesdorff, Loet, 2015. "A review of theory and practice in scientometrics," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 246(1), pages 1-19.
    5. Anne-Wil Harzing & Satu Alakangas & David Adams, 2014. "hIa: an individual annual h-index to accommodate disciplinary and career length differences," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 99(3), pages 811-821, June.
    6. Dag W. Aksnes & Liv Langfeldt & Paul Wouters, 2019. "Citations, Citation Indicators, and Research Quality: An Overview of Basic Concepts and Theories," SAGE Open, , vol. 9(1), pages 21582440198, February.
    7. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Flavia Di Costa, 2019. "The collaboration behavior of top scientists," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 118(1), pages 215-232, January.
    8. Zoltán Krajcsák, 2021. "Researcher Performance in Scopus Articles ( RPSA ) as a New Scientometric Model of Scientific Output: Tested in Business Area of V4 Countries," Publications, MDPI, vol. 9(4), pages 1-23, October.
    9. Liu, Meijun & Hu, Xiao, 2021. "Will collaborators make scientists move? A Generalized Propensity Score analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(1).
    10. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Francesco Rosati, 2014. "Relatives in the same university faculty: nepotism or merit?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(1), pages 737-749, October.
    11. Abramo, Giovanni & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea & Rosati, Francesco, 2013. "The importance of accounting for the number of co-authors and their order when assessing research performance at the individual level in the life sciences," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(1), pages 198-208.
    12. Abramo, Giovanni & Aksnes, Dag W. & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea, 2021. "Gender differences in research performance within and between countries: Italy vs Norway," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2).
    13. Massimo Aria & Michelangelo Misuraca & Maria Spano, 2020. "Mapping the Evolution of Social Research and Data Science on 30 Years of Social Indicators Research," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 149(3), pages 803-831, June.
    14. Maor Weinberger & Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, 2021. "Diversity of success: measuring the scholarly performance diversity of tenured professors in the Israeli academia," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(4), pages 2931-2970, April.
    15. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Francesco Rosati, 2016. "The north–south divide in the Italian higher education system," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 2093-2117, December.
    16. Lei Li & Yan Wang & Guanfeng Liu & Meng Wang & Xindong Wu, 2015. "Context-Aware Reviewer Assignment for Trust Enhanced Peer Review," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(6), pages 1-28, June.
    17. Wu, Jiang, 2013. "Investigating the universal distributions of normalized indicators and developing field-independent index," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(1), pages 63-71.
    18. Giovanni Abramo & Corrado Costa & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo, 2015. "A multivariate stochastic model to assess research performance," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(2), pages 1755-1772, February.
    19. Shaon Sahoo, 2016. "Analyzing research performance: proposition of a new complementary index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 108(2), pages 489-504, August.
    20. Christopher McCarty & James W. Jawitz & Allison Hopkins & Alex Goldman, 2013. "Predicting author h-index using characteristics of the co-author network," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 96(2), pages 467-483, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:114:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-017-2606-5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.