Getting promoted early in academic careers and being more productive later on are closely connected, and a recent study by Adam Mickiewicz University shed light on this in a new way.
The researchers used two time-related aspects—promotion age and promotion speed—to create individual profiles for academics based on their lifetime biographies and publications. This study, recently published, took a different approach by using a classification method and a new measure called normalized productivity.
A new approach
Instead of the usual productivity measures, which focus on counting publications, this new approach considers the prestige of the journals, reflecting varied scholarly contributions and impacts on the academic community.
The study looked at a large group of Polish scientists in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields—16,083 in total. They were sorted into different classes based on productivity, promotion age, and promotion speed (top 20%, middle 60%, and bottom 20%).
The findings were consistent across all disciplines. Scientists who were promoted at a younger age and at a faster pace in the past turned out to be the most productive now. On the flip side, scientists who were promoted at an older age and at a slower pace in the past were currently the least productive.
Productivity gap
For associate professors in the three largest disciplines, the difference in productivity between those promoted at a young age and those promoted at an old age was between 100% and 200% (150% to 200% for full professors). Similarly, the productivity gap between those with a fast promotion speed and those with a slow promotion speed was between 80% and 150% for associate professors (100% to 170% for full professors).
These results were partially supported by a regression analysis that looked at the odds of belonging to top productivity classes.
The study used a combination of biographical and demographic data from the national register of all Polish scientists and publication information from all Polish articles indexed in Scopus (a total of 935,167 articles) to analyze the sample.
The study highlighted the effectiveness of structured Big Data in examining academic careers, while also acknowledging its limitations.
