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

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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 .

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Notes

  1. “Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del Sistema Universitario e della Ricerca”.

  2. Scientific disciplinary sectors established by MIUR: "General sociology, Sociology of culture and communication, Economic sociology, Environmental sociology, Political sociology and Sociology of law and social change".

  3. In order to ensure the full correspondence between MIUR and Scopus records, we not only automatically checked the correspondence with MIUR names and Scopus profile with multiple criteria and step-by-step procedures. We also cross-checked manually each conflicting or absent case by a group of three independent assistants. As emphasized by (Abramo and D’Angelo 2011b; Pepe and Kurtz 2012; De Stefano et al. 2013), this is a time consuming and hard task but is the only way to reduce mistakes, also sometimes due to surname changes (e.g., marriage or divorce) and homonyms.

  4. To do so we wrote an R (2016) script that interacted with Scopus API. First, we searched each of these authors’ last and first names in Scopus to see if they had official profiles. When available, we extracted all publications records of these authors throughout their scientific career. We started data gathering by sending search queries to Scopus API on July 27th 2016, while from September 8th 2016 we started gathering Scopus CSV exports of all available information on publications for each author through Scopus web interface to build links with data from API interface and cover up differences and shortages. To manipulate the data and modeling it, we have used Base (2016), Dplyr (2016), Igraph (2006), lme4 (2015), stargazer (2015), ggplot2 (2009) and Stringdist (2014) packages in R to write data cleaning and statistical analysis procedures.

  5. Elaborated models with these variables are included in the “Appendix” (Tables 4, 5). Note that we did not present models including impact factor of journals in FSS as their results were in line with those presented here.

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Correspondence to Aliakbar Akbaritabar.

Appendix

Appendix

This appendix includes further data and results that complement the analysis shown in the article. In particular, it provides details on our multilevel and macro level models.

Regression models comparison

Table 4 compares different multilevel models that we run with the same random effects structure as those presented in the Table 1. These versions included our institutional embeddedness variables as fixed effects. Results confirmed the importance of academic status (i.e., younger scientists are more productive), certain gender effects and stable co-authorship patterns on the number of publications. They also confirmed geographical, localisation effects.

Table 4 Comparative table of multilevel regression models

Table 5 compares macro level models that ruled out the potential difference between sociologists working in the same universities to see the results between universities. Given that we had a considerable number of these association (78), we wanted to check if this could have biased our analysis. Results suggest that the findings presented in the article were statistically robust.

Table 5 Comparative table of Macro level regression models

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Akbaritabar, A., Casnici, N. & Squazzoni, F. The conundrum of research productivity: a study on sociologists in Italy. Scientometrics 114, 859–882 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2606-5

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