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Do the best scholars attract the highest speaking fees? An exploration of internal and external influence

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Abstract

This study investigates whether academics can capitalize on their external prominence (measured by the number of pages indexed on Google, TED talk invitations or New York Times bestselling book successes) and internal success within academia (measured by publication and citation performance) in the speakers’ market. The results indicate that the larger the number of web pages indexing a particular scholar, the higher the minimum speaking fee. Invitations to speak at a TED event, or making the New York Times Best Seller list is also positively correlated with speaking fees. Scholars with a stronger internal impact or success also achieve higher speaking fees. However, once external impact is controlled, most metrics used to measure internal impact are no longer statistically significant.

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Notes

  1. http://www.ulb.ac.be/inforsciences2/communication/coursComm/docs/royal_society.pdf.

  2. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/book/.

  3. http://bigspeak.com/.

  4. http://kepplerspeakers.com/.

  5. http://leadingauthorities.com/.

  6. http://premierespeakers.com/.

  7. http://speakerpedia.com/.

  8. http://speakersplatform.com/.

  9. http://thesweeneyagency.com/.

  10. http://washingtonspeakers.com/.

  11. Only 3.79 % (22 speakers) have no fee range.

  12. We first use the combination of the words “professor”, “director”, “fellow” and suffix such as “-mist”, “-logist”, “-icist” with words like “university”, “college”, or “institute” to identify whether the speaker is a scientist. Then, we search for prefix such as “econ”, “bio”, “phy”, “psy” and “medic” to classify speakers into in the fields in which they are active. To ensure the accuracy of this automated filtering, we perform a manual Google search on the career field of speakers who are filtered out.

  13. https://www.linkedin.com/.

  14. There are, of course, other possible methods by which we could measure external impact. For an overview, see Chan et al. (2013).

  15. 154 speakers are excluded from all 734 eligible speakers filtered out by the automated search due to spurious name matches.

  16. For a discussion regarding informal and formal communication see Kousha and Thelwall (2007).

  17. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/index.cfm/chapter-7/c7h.htm.

  18. http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.

  19. http://blog.ted.com/2013/12/16/the-most-popular-20-ted-talks-2013/. As of April 30, 2014 it had attracted 26,222,340 views.

  20. http://blog.ted.com/2012/11/13/ted-reaches-its-billionth-video-view/.

  21. The list of TED speakers is extracted from https://www.ted.com/talks/list/.

  22. See http://catalog.loc.gov/.

  23. See http://www.hawes.com/pastlist.htm/. Prior to 11th September 1977, the best-selling list captures the top 10 best-selling books.

  24. The list includes (in alphabetical order): Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, Dingle Prize, Donald Murray Prize, Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, Heartland Prize, Innis-Gérin Medal, Jerusalem Prize, Kistler Prize, Lannan Literary Awards, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Ludwik Fleck Prize, Michael Faraday Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize, Royal Society Prizes for Science Books, Samuel Johnson Prize, Science Communication Awards, Science in Society Journalism Awards, and the Specsavers National Book Awards.

  25. See http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm/ and Harzing (2010).

  26. See Glänzel (2006) for a further discussion of shortcomings of the h-index.

  27. Publish or Perish limits the maximum number of authors considered to 50 (Harzing et al. 2014).

  28. See http://www.elsevier.com/online-tools/scopus/content-overview

  29. http://wokinfo.com/citationconnection/ and http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlresults.cgi?PC=MASTER .

  30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball_(film).

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Acknowledgments

For advice and suggestions thanks are due to two anonymous referees.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queensland Behavioural Economics Group (QuBE), School of Economics and Finance, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Ho Fai Chan, Markus Schaffner, Benno Torgler & Stephen Whyte

  2. Warwick Business School, University of Warwick and Department of Economics, Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany

    Bruno S. Frey

  3. Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Jana Gallus

  4. ISBS, EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht, Oestrich-Winkel, Germany

    Benno Torgler

  5. CREMA – Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts, Südstrasse 11, 8008, Zurich, Switzerland

    Bruno S. Frey & Benno Torgler

Authors
  1. Ho Fai Chan
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  2. Bruno S. Frey
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Benno Torgler.

Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 4 and Table 6.

Table 6 Correlation matrix of internal impact proxies (Google Scholar and Scopus)
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Chan, H.F., Frey, B.S., Gallus, J. et al. Do the best scholars attract the highest speaking fees? An exploration of internal and external influence. Scientometrics 101, 793–817 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1379-3

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