Abstract
We investigate the question of how long top scientists retain their stardom. We observe the research performance of all Italian professors in the sciences over three consecutive four-year periods, between 2001 and 2012. The top scientists of the first period are identified on the basis of research productivity, and their performance is then tracked through time. The analyses demonstrate that more than a third of the nation’s top scientists maintain this status over the three consecutive periods, with higher shares occurring in the life sciences and lower ones in engineering. Compared to males, females are less likely to maintain top status. There are also regional differences, among which top status is less likely to survive in southern Italy than in the north. Finally we investigate the longevity of unproductive professors, and then check whether the career progress of the top and unproductive scientists is aligned with their respective performances. The results appear to have implications for national policies on academic recruitment and advancement.
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The complete list is accessible on http://attiministeriali.miur.it/UserFiles/115.htm, last accessed November 14, 2016.
Mathematics and computer sciences, Physics, Chemistry, Earth sciences, Biology, Medicine, Agricultural and veterinary sciences, Civil engineering, Industrial and information engineering.
http://cercauniversita.cineca.it/php5/docenti/cerca.php, last accessed November 14, 2016.
Abramo et al. (2012a) demonstrated that the average of the distribution of citations received for all cited publications of the same year and subject category is the most effective scaling factor.
It must be noted that different fractional counting across disciplines does not cause any bias, because the top 10% scientists are extracted from each field. To exemplify, if we did not weight the authors’ contribution in Cardiology, the top 10% scientists in cardiology might change, but all the remaining top scientists (from the other fields) would be exactly the same.
In order to check the consistency of the results, we adopt also another definition of TS, as the one whose performance falls above the mean of the subpopulation above the first mean of the overall population in their SDS, by the CSS technique (Glänzel and Schubert 1988).
Concerning the intersections of two periods, we repeated the analyses but relaxing the constraint that the TSs must be on staff from three periods to two periods. Under this changed condition, the share of those who maintained their stardom for two periods resulted exactly the same as in Table 1.
We did not conduct the UN analysis at discipline level, since the differences in shares of UNs are heavily affected by WoS coverage and by publication behaviors unique to the disciplines (Abramo et al. 2015).
http://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/topnews/2016/09/23/cantone-allarme-corruzione-universita_687f391c-802c-478b-b9e4-6d4f3c1b8f0d.html, last accessed November 14, 2016.
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An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2255-8.
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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Soldatenkova, A. How long do top scientists maintain their stardom? An analysis by region, gender and discipline: evidence from Italy. Scientometrics 110, 867–877 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2193-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2193-x