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Variation in research collaboration patterns across academic ranks

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Abstract

The ability to activate and manage effective collaborations is becoming an increasingly important criteria in policies on academic career advancement. The rise of such policies leads to development of indicators that permit measurement of the propensity to collaborate for academics of different ranks, and to examine the role of several variables in collaboration, first among these being the researchers’ disciplines. In this work we apply an innovative bibliometric approach based on individual propensity for collaboration to measure the differences in propensity across academic ranks, by discipline and for choice of collaboration forms—intramural, extramural domestic and international. The analysis is based on the scientific production of Italian academics for the period 2006–2010, totaling over 200,000 publications indexed in Web of Science. It shows that assistant professors register a propensity for intramural collaboration that is clearly greater than for professors of higher ranks. Vice versa, the higher ranks, but not quite so clearly, register greater propensity to collaborate at the international level.

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Notes

  1. The complete list is accessible at http://attiministeriali.miur.it/UserFiles/115.htm, last accessed on August 30, 2013.

  2. In the Italian case 23 % of academics produce 77 % of overall scientific advancement (Abramo et al. 2013c).

  3. http://cercauniversita.cineca.it/php5/docenti/cerca.php, last accessed on August 30, 2013.

  4. We exclude those document types that cannot be strictly considered as true research products, such as editorial material, meeting abstracts, replies, etc.

  5. In "Indicators and methods" section we describe the methodological assumptions that address this critical problem.

  6. Single-authored papers with more than one affiliation are not considered as collaborations. A publication with more than two authors could present different forms of collaboration, for example intramural and extramural domestic. In this case it is counted in calculating propensity for each form of collaboration observed.

  7. Although our dataset includes the entire population of Italian academics and is not a sample, we still apply the significance test for potential purposes of extending the results to other contexts and periods.

  8. The Mann–Whitney U test compares two samples, verifying the significance of the difference between the medians. For this reason there can be cases where the test shows a positive (or negative) difference between two samples even where the first sample has an average that is lower (higher) than the second (see the case of the comparison between full and associate professors in Pedagogy and psychology, Table 2).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Studies of Research and Technology Transfer, Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi e Informatica (IASI-CNR), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Viale Manzoni 30, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Abramo

  2. Laboratory for Studies of Research and Technology Transfer (IASI-CNR), Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Impresa, Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133, Rome, Italy

    Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

  3. Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione e Science Matematiche, Università degli Studi di Siena, Via Roma 56, 53100, Siena, Italy

    Gianluca Murgia

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  1. Giovanni Abramo
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Correspondence to Giovanni Abramo.

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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Murgia, G. Variation in research collaboration patterns across academic ranks. Scientometrics 98, 2275–2294 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1185-3

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