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Dancing with the academic elite: a promotion or hindrance of research production?

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Abstract

The academic elite possesses outstanding abilities in terms of knowledge innovation, while they produce a spillover effect on other researchers. This study takes micro level data from projects under the Management Science Sector of the National Natural Science Foundation of China between 2006 and 2010 to define the three categories of funded elite, distinguished young elite, and Cheung Kong scholars; it also examines the correlation between identifying as “elite” and his or her individual project output in order to explore the elite’s spillover effect on the knowledge output of other project principal investigators within the organization. We found that the three categories of elites had more output while they generated mixed spillover effect on their institute researchers’ output. At the end, we discuss the reasons and policy implications behind this phenomenon.

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Notes

  1. Kwiek (2016) shows that among the the 11 countries in Europe, researchers whose research productivity ranked in the top 10 % accounted for nearly 50 % of total knowledge creation. White et al. (2012) shows that within the field of biotechnology, 0.7 % of the scholars published 17.3 % of related papers.

  2. Since the analysis in this paper proceeds from data provided by the Management Science Department, we do not confer the title of “academic elite” to academicians.

  3. http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/nsfc/cen/xmzn/2013xmzn/08/index.html.

  4. http://www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2012/content_2144289.htm.

  5. A National Key Universities and Colleges project initiated in 1995 by the Chinese Ministry of Education, with the intent of raising the research standards of high-level universities and cultivating strategies for socio-economic development. Institutions of higher education are designated as 211 Project institutions after meeting certain scientific, technical, and human resources standards.

  6. Based on vague multi-criteria decision-making, Zhang et al. (2015a, b) showed that “general projects”, “young scholar projects”, and “distinguish young scholars fund projects” (including foreign scholars) are the three types of NFSC-funded projects that have been most successful at project management implementation.

  7. In our sample, the records for organization are university and research institutions the PIs are affiliated to. Since PIs in our sample are in the management science section and given most of PIs applying fund of management science section are from school of management and someone from school of economics, so the organization is actually at what we call "broad management department" level.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge research funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71503291, No. 71573291 and No. L1524030), the Chinese Ministry of Education General Research for Humanities and Social Sciences (No. 14YJC630209), and the Ministry of Science and Technology (ZLY2015117) as well as 121 Talent Projects for Young Doctors of Central University of Finance and Economics (QBJ1430).

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  1. Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China

    Zhifeng Yin & Qiang Zhi

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  1. Zhifeng Yin
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Yin, Z., Zhi, Q. Dancing with the academic elite: a promotion or hindrance of research production?. Scientometrics 110, 17–41 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2151-7

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