Interdisciplinary researchers attain better long-term funding performance

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All downhill from the PhD? The typical impact trajectory of US academic careers

© 2020 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00072.Within academia, mature researchers tend to be more senior, but do they also tend to write higher impact articles? This article assesses long-term publishing (16+ years) United States (US) researchers, contrasting them with shorter-term publishing researchers (1, 6 or 10 years). A long-term US researcher is operationalised as having a first Scopus-indexed journal article in exactly 2001 and one in 2016-2019, with US main affiliations in their first and last articles. Researchers publishing in large teams (11+ authors) were excluded. The average field and year normalised citation impact of long- and shorter-term US researchers’ journal articles decreases over time relative to the national average, with especially large falls to the last articles published that may be at least partly due to a decline in self-citations. In many cases researchers start by publishing above US average citation impact research and end by publishing below US average citation impact research. Thus, research managers should not assume that senior researchers will usually write the highest impact papers

The Rms Framework of Academic Marketing Research Productivity

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a thorough grasp of exceptional academic marketing research productivity in the leading academic marketing journals (The Journal of Marketing, The Journal of Marketing Research, The Journal of Consumer Research, and Marketing Science). Producing strong academic marketing research in the leading journals benefits society, academic institutions and individual students and scholars. However, this task is difficult, success is rare, and competition is fierce for limited spots in each journal addition. This research will explore three research questions that deal with accomplishing the task of publication in a leading marketing journal: 1. How do resources acquired from Ph.D. training, academic affiliation, and academic collaborations impact academic marketing research productivity? 2. How does intrinsic motivation impact academic marketing research productivity? 3. How does a strategy utilizing cosmopolitan collaboration impact academic marketing research productivity? To tackle these questions, this dissertation will develop a conceptual structure including Resources, Motivation, and Strategy, known as the RMS framework. This framework will benefit academic researchers and department chairs looking to increase publication performance in top academic marketing journals. In line with the second and third research questions, the second objective is to develop a managerially focused v framework and propositions that are needed for RMS adoption considerations. This study may make an important theoretical contribution to the field of marketing via creation of the RMS framework. Based on a thorough review of literature, this dissertation develops a definition of RMS. This research then integrates relevant factors that influence adoption of RMS by individuals to propose a conceptual framework and five hypotheses. This dissertation empirically tests the five hypotheses using data collected from a questionnaire, then analysis using multiple regression and binary logistic regression and then presents findings. Finally, after collecting data and analysis of the results this dissertation provides conclusions, theoretical implications, managerial implications, limitations, and avenues for future research

Scholarly Collaboration In Engineering Education: From Big-Data Scientometrics To User-Centered Software Design

Engineering education research has grown into a flourishing community with an-ever increasing number of publications and scholars. However, recent studies show that a significant amount of engineering education knowledge retains a clear disciplinary orientation. If the gaps in scholarly collaboration continue to be prevalent within the entire community, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain community memory. This will eventually inhibit the propagation of innovations and slow the movement of research findings into practice. This dissertation studies scholarly collaboration in the engineering education research community. It provides a clear characterization of collaboration problems and proposes potential solutions. The dissertation is composed of four studies. First, the dissertation recognizes gaps in scholarly collaboration in the engineering education research community. To achieve this goal, a bibliometric analysis based on 24,172 academic articles was performed to describe the anatomy of collaboration patterns. Second, the dissertation reviewed existing technologies that enhance communication and collaboration in engineering and science. This review elaborated and compared features in 12 popular social research network sites to examine how these features support scholarly communication and collaboration. Third, this dissertation attempted to understand engineering education scholars‟ behaviors and needs related to scholarly collaboration. A grounded theory study was conducted to investigate engineering education scholars‟ behaviors in developing collaboration and their technology usage. Finally, a user-centered software design was proposed as a technological solution that addressed community collaboration needs. Results show that the engineering education research community is at its early stage of forming a small world network relying primarily on a small number of key scholars in the community. Scholars‟ disciplinary background, research areas, and geographical locations are factors that affect scholarly collaboration. To facilitate scholarly communication and collaboration, social research network sites started to be adopted by scholars in various disciplines. However, engineering education scholars still prefer face-to-face interactions, emails, and phone calls for connecting and collaborating with other scholars. Instead of connecting to other scholars online, the present study shows that scholars develop new connections and maintain existing connections mainly by attending academic conferences. Some of these connections may eventually develop into collaborative relationships. Therefore, one way to increase scholarly collaboration in engineering education is to help scholars better network with others during conferences. A new mobile/web application is designed in this dissertation to meet this user need. The diffusion of innovation theory and the small world network model suggest that a well-connected community has real advantages in disseminating information quickly and broadly among its members. It allows research innovations to produce greater impacts and to reach a broader range of audiences. It can also close the gap between scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds. This dissertation contributes to enhancing community awareness of the overall collaboration status in engineering education research. It informs policy making on how to improve collaboration and helps individual scientists recognize potential collaboration opportunities. It also guides the future development of communication and collaboration tools used in engineering education research

Maximising the impacts of your research: a handbook for social scientists

The responsibility of researchers and academics is to think their research through carefully from the outset, p aying at least some attention to what ‘works’ in terms of reaching and influencin g other researchers or external audiences. Researchers need to construct a nd maintain a portfolio of projects that help them make a difference to their discipline. They also need to try to ensure that the social sciences make some fo rm of contribution to the wider social world and context in which the researc her is embedded.This Handbook aims to help researchers achieve a more professional and focused approach to their research from the outset. It provides a large menu of sound and evidence-based advice and guidance on how to ensure that your work achieves its maximum visibility and influence with both academic and external audiences. As with any menu, readers need to pick and choose the elements that are relev ant for them. We provide detailed information on what constitutes good pract ice in expanding the impact of social science research. We also survey a wide range of new developments, new tools and new techniques that can help make sen se of a rapidly changing field

Scientists in the principal investigator role

The social and economic contributions of R&D are essential in the development of countries, since they are the motor for their progress. Research can be implemented by companies, but it can also be implemented in universities and research centres. The research process is more and more often conducted in teams and these are increasingly multidisciplinary. This is a double-edge sword because, even though diversity among research team members could increase the generation of innovative and creative ideas, this heterogeneity can also have a dark side for the welfare of the research team. Therefore, when both advantages and disadvantages can emerge in a diverse research team, what can diminish the weaknesses and enhance the strengths is the crucial role of an efficient principal investigator managing and leading the research team. Notwithstanding that there are some studies that have focused on the principal investigator role in the literature, the knowledge about them is somewhat scant, because there is still a need for a deeper understanding of this crucial actor in R&D environments. The research work carried out in this Doctoral Thesis aims to address both principal investigators and their environments. With this research, we will deepen the understanding of what influences principal investigators and what they have an influence on, since principal investigators are a key asset in R&D environments. Therefore, the focus of this Doctoral Thesis is on some of the issues that are in the core of the influence of principal investigators on the activities of R&D teams. Particularly, we focus our research efforts on developing a measurement scale of the principal investigator's human capital whose results could allow us to determine whether different principal investigator profiles exist. We also focus on studying whether obtaining public competitive funding could be influenced by the principal investigator's priorities or their gender. Moreover, we focus on the relationship between the level of conflict within a research team and its performance, as well as on the influence that the principal investigator's transformational leadership has on this relationship

Interdisciplinarity among Academic Scientists: Individual and Organizational Factors

Drawing on a wide variety of social science theories, this study investigates the effects of tenure system, university climate for interdisciplinary research (IDR), gender, and industry experience on academic scientists’ engagement in IDR in different disciplines. Using survey and bibliometric data, two dependent variables are generated to measure production aspects of IDR: the self-reported percentage of IDR papers which is from researchers’ own estimate of their IDR papers responding to one survey question, and the calculated percentage of IDR papers which is a combination of two bibliometric indicators of scientists’ borrowing and boundary crossing activities. Results find that our conventional wisdom about the effects of some individual and organizational factors on scientists’ propensity to engage in IDR is outdated, and their effects depend on the disciplinary contexts. These findings suggest science policy makers, funding agencies and university administrators to keep fresh and informed about scientists’ research activities and underlying context and take full into account of distinct characteristics of different disciplines when they make or reform policies to encourage IDR work