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Career advancement and scientific performance in universities

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Abstract

Many governments have placed priority on excellence in higher education as part of their policy agendas. Processes for recruitment and career advancement in universities thus have a critical role. The efficiency of faculty selection processes can be evaluated by comparing the subsequent performance of competition winners against that of the losers and the pre-existing staff of equal academic rank. Our study presents an empirical analysis concerning the recruitment procedures for associate professors in the Italian university system. The results of a bibliometric analysis of the hard science areas reveal that new associate professors are on average more productive than the incumbents. However a number of crucial concerns emerge, in particular concerning occurrence of non-winner candidates that are more productive than the winners over the subsequent triennium, and cases of winners that are completely unproductive. Beyond the implications for the Italian case, the analysis offers considerations for all decision-makers regarding the ex post evaluation of the efficiency of the recruitment process and the desirability of providing selection committees with bibliometric indicators in support of evaluation (i.e. informed peer review).

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Notes

  1. The comparative evaluation of teaching activity is generally more difficult, although we can assume a significant correlation between teaching and research, particularly since quality in teaching will in part follow from scientific merit.

  2. This law was intended to grant increased autonomy and responsibility to the universities to establish their own organizational frameworks, including charters and regulations. Subsequently, Law 537 (Article 5) of 1993 and Decree 168 of 1996 provided further changes intended to increase university involvement in overall decision-making on use of resources, and to encourage individual institutions to operate on the market and reach their own economic and financial equilibrium.

  3. Researchers that we define “unproductive” may actually publish in international journals not indexed by Web of Science, or codify the new knowledge produced in different forms, such as books, patents, etc.

  4. The committees could also indicate a single winner, however in reality this occurred very rarely.

  5. The complete list is accessible on http://attiministeriali.miur.it/UserFiles/115.htm, last accessed on March 4, 2013.

  6. A typical example is statisticians, who may apply their theory to medicine, physics, social sciences, etc.

  7. For details, see Abramo et al. 2013b.

  8. If first and last authors belong to the same university, 40 % of the contribution is assigned to each of them; the remaining 20 % is divided among all other authors. If the first two and last two authors belong to different universities, 30 % of the contribution is assigned to first and last authors; 15 % is attributed to second and last author but one; the remaining 10 % is divided among all others. The weighting values were assigned following advice from senior Italian professors in the life sciences. The values could be changed to suit different practices in other national contexts.

  9. http://cercauniversita.cineca.it, last accessed on March 4, 2013.

  10. Retrieved from: http://reclutamento.murst.it/, the open Web site managed by the MIUR, titled “Comparative evaluation in the recruitment of University Professors and Researchers (Law 3, 3 July 1998, no. 210)”.

  11. At the time of the current research, eleven competitions had not been completed.

  12. M-PSI/01: General Psychology; M-PSI/02: Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology; M-PSI/03: Psychometrics; M-EDF/01: Teaching Methods for Physical Activities; M-EDF/02: Teaching Methods for Sport; SECS-P/05: Econometrics; SECS-S/01: Statistics; SECS-S/06: Mathematics for Economics, Actuarial Studies and Finance.

  13. In this UDA WoS coverage is quite limited, which shows in a very high number of non-productive (in bibliometric terms) professors. In this UDA, our findings need to be interpreted with additional special caution.

  14. The number of candidates that actually arrived at the stage of committee evaluation was consistently less than the initial applicants, especially in SDSs where many universities launched competitions. .

  15. For our own evaluation, there must be at least one non-winner who held the role of assistant professor over the subsequent triennium, for at least one year.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Studies of Research and Technology Transfer at the Institute for System Analysis and Computer Science (IASI-CNR), National Research Council of Italy, Viale Manzoni 30, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

  2. Department of Management and Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133, Rome, Italy

    Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Francesco Rosati

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  1. Giovanni Abramo
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  2. Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo
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Correspondence to Giovanni Abramo.

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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Rosati, F. Career advancement and scientific performance in universities. Scientometrics 98, 891–907 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1075-8

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