How long do top scientists maintain their stardom? An analysis by region, gender and discipline: evidence from Italy

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

The promiscuity of publishing partners

This is the author accepted manuscrip. The final version is available from ISPIM via the link in this recordWhile some empirical evidence indicates clear benefits to coauthorship in terms of speed, volume and diffusion of publishing outcomes, coauthorships have also been shown to be prone to difficulties. There is also limited guidance available on how to initiate new publishing partnerships with higher likelihood of success. Through a review of literatures on co-authorship across numerous disciplines, we are able to identify author attributes that could provide some initial search criteria for evaluating prospective publishing partnerships. However, this same review suggests that the process through which successful co-authorships develop is complex, being influenced by contextual factors and with varying—even contradictory—outcomes associated with individual attributes and their combinations. With a view on the innovation management field, we argue that it is essential to extend previous research to analyze multiple author attributes and success measures simultaneously, encompass both individual and organizational-level variables, as well as understand the specificities of certain research areas and disciplinary tradition

Cultural Valorisation: A comprehensive and pondered perspective for the evaluation of small museums

This study introduces the Cultural Valorisation, an evaluation method developed for small museums, considering the balance between their cultural and business aspects. Small museums are underrated organisations; although similar to large museums, they have distinctive characteristics: low budget, polyvalent staff and indispensable volunteers. Purposes are the fundamental reasons for their existences. Museums must be faithful to their purposes – deviating from them may be harmful. This study introduces ‘purpose- drift’, as consequence of either excess or deficiency of managerial practices, bureaucracy, or marketing

Nurturing Global Growth Companies: Time For a New Policy Toolkit

The recent report of the Council of Canadian Academies (2018) on the state of science, technology and industrial R&D in Canada provides an authoritative assessment of where Canada stands relative to our major competitors.  The CCA report reveals that Canada remains strong in several fields of research; the recent Nobel awards in widely different domains of physics to Arthur B. McDonald ( 2015) and Donna Strickland ( 2018) and the granting of the A.M. Turing Award to Canadian computer scientists Yoshua Bengio (2019) and Geoffrey Hinton (Toronto, 2019), provide ample support for this assessment. More generally, Canadian scientists are highly regarded; their average citation rank is above the world average in all fields and Canada stands in fourth place in terms of research reputation.  Of particular concern, however, is that compared to other OECD countries

Mountains, cones and dilemmas of context: the case of "ordinary language" in philosophy and social scientific method

The order of influence from thesis to hypothesis, and from philosophy to the social sciences, has historically governed the way in which the abstraction and significance of language as an empirical object is determined. In this paper, an argument is made for the development of a more reflexive intellectual relationship between ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and the social sciences that it helped inspire. It is demonstrated that, and how, the social scientific traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis press OLP to re-consider the variety of problematic abstractions it has previously made for the sake of philosophical clarity, thereby self-reinvigorating