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Determinants of success for biomedical researchers: a perception-based study in a health science research environment

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Abstract

New institutions are coming to the fore as stakeholders in research, particularly hospitals and clinical departments involved in providing health care. As a result, new environments for research are gaining importance. This study aims to investigate how different individual characteristics, together with collective and contextual factors, affect the activity and performance of researchers in the particular setting of hospitals and research centres affiliated with the Spanish National Health System (NHS). We used a combination of quantitative science indicators and perception-based data obtained through a survey of researchers working at NHS hospitals and research centres. Inbreeding and involvement in clinical research is the combination of factors with the greatest influence on scientific productivity, because these factors are associated with increased scientific output both overall as well as in high-impact journals. Ultimately, however, satisfaction with human resources in research group combined with gender (linked in turn to leadership) is the combination of factors associated most clearly with the most relevant indicator of productivity success, i.e. the number of articles in high-impact journals as principal author. Researchers’ competitiveness in obtaining research funding as principal investigator is associated with a combination of satisfaction with research autonomy and involvement in clinical research. Researchers’ success is not significantly related with their age, seniority and international experience. The way health care institutions manage and combine the factors likely to influence research may be critical for the development and maintenance of research-conducive environments, and ultimately for the success of research carried out in hospitals and other settings within the national public health system.

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Notes

  1. Authorship position is increasingly used in research production assessment. In the experimental and biomedical sciences, the most widely accepted convention is that the most important positions in the list of authors are the first and the last ones (Savitz 1999; Tscharntke et al. 2007). The first-named author is usually responsible for the experimental work reported in the manuscript, and is often designated the corresponding author. The last-named author is usually assumed to be responsible for supervision and leadership of the research team, and this by-line position is often occupied by the most senior author (Moed 2000; Costas and Bordons 2011).

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Acknowledgments

The present study would not have been possible without the contributions of many people. Our thanks go to all researchers who patiently completed the survey. We acknowledge Belén Garzón, José Manuel Rojo and Almudena Mata, from the Statistical Analysis Unit at the Centre for Human and Social Sciences (CCHS-CSIC), for their help with the statistical analysis of the data. We also thank María Bordons and the personnel of the ACUTE research group for facilitating access to their bibliometric database. Our particular thanks go to Joan Comella for his unfailing encouragement to undertake this project. Among colleagues at different institutions who aided us in different phases of the project, we express our particular appreciation to Joaquín Arenas, Manuel Carrasco, Mercedes Dulanto, Fernando Gómez, Isabel Mangas, Álvaro Roldán and the rest of the staff at the Carlos III Health Institute; José Luis Martínez and José Antonio Pereiro at the Ministry of Education and Science; and Carmen Cotelo, Aurelio Rodriguez and José Vilariño at the Supercomputing Centre of Galicia (CESGA). We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. We also thank K. Shashok for improving the use of English in the manuscript.

This work was supported by the Carlos III Health Institute General Subdirectorate for the Evaluation and Promotion of Research, Spanish Ministry of Health, and by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, within the framework of the Spanish RDI Plan (grant numbers PI10/00462, PI06/0983 and SAF2005-24634-E).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Biological Sciences, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, Spain

    M. Teresa Antonio-García

  2. Research Group on Scientific Evaluation and Transfer, Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), C/Albasanz, 26-28, Madrid, Spain

    Irene López-Navarro & Jesús Rey-Rocha

Authors
  1. M. Teresa Antonio-García
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  2. Irene López-Navarro
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  3. Jesús Rey-Rocha
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jesús Rey-Rocha.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 4.

Table 4 Descriptive statistics
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Appendix 2

See Tables 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Table 5 ANOVA model for productivity in WoS journals (art-N)
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Table 6 ANOVA model for productivity in first-quartile JCR journals (art-Q1)
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Table 7 ANOVA model for first/last-authorships in WoS journals (art-FL)
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Table 8 ANOVA model for first/last-authorships in first-quartile JCR journals (art-Q1-FL)
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Table 9 ANOVA model for participation in research projects (proj-N)
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Table 10 ANOVA model for participation in research projects as principal investigator (proj-PR)
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Antonio-García, M.T., López-Navarro, I. & Rey-Rocha, J. Determinants of success for biomedical researchers: a perception-based study in a health science research environment. Scientometrics 101, 1747–1779 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1376-6

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