QUANTITATIVE SOCIOLOGY OF ACADEMIC WORK IN AN ERA OF HYPERCOMPETITION AND RANKINGS

In recent years, higher education institutes have shifted towards managerial organisational models. Some observers see this as a sign of our neoliberal times, with obsession for rankings, performance indicators and resource allocation. The result is that academic work is more competitive nowadays. Rankings and quantitative analysis of research output are more and more crucial for hiring, promotion and funding allocations. Chapter 2 touches upon these themes and suggests the fruitfulness of cross fertilisation between sociology and science studies. To study this hyper-competitive context, we designed a complex research project to answer different questions regarding multi-faceted aspects of the subject. Our main question was to find what factors drive research collaboration and productivity. These factors are helping some researchers be more successful than others in current evaluation based system. We have employed two sets of data to achieve this goal. One national and one international, both considering the case of sociologists. For individual research productivity measurement and to explore correlates of this productivity (Chapter 3) and macro level policy effect analysis (Chapter 4), we reconstructed the full publication list of all currently hired Italian sociologists on available data. We looked into their research productivity and how they have reacted to the ANVUR national policies by taking into account their embeddedness in different academic contexts. Our aim in Chapter 3 was to explain individual research productivity with organisational embeddedness and we found that male scientists, those working more internationally, and those working with a similar group of coauthors were more productive but not necessarily more cited by other members of the community.In Chapter 4, we analysed the effects of the Italian national research assessment exercise (VQR 2004-2010 by ANVUR) on research productivity and publication behavior of sociologists. Results showed that ANVUR had a limited influence on research productivity. Indeed most differences in individual research productivity of Italian sociologists were due to individual characteristics. Academics who experienced a promotion after 2010 were the most prolific authors.To explore the structural and societal effects on research productivity of sociologists in a more competitive arena at the international level, in Chapter 5, we reconstructed gender, background information and coauthorship networks of all published authors in two top sociology journals, i.e., the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) and the American Sociological Review (ASR). We expected that examining the \ue9lite of our community could reveal interesting patterns, especially to understand certain implications of the hyper-competitive academic culture. We found that white male authors affiliated to US institutes were over-represented in these journals. We also found that male authors tended to work more in team and found trace of significant gender and ethnicity penalties. In Chapter 6 we looked into research communities formation and evolution through the time among Italian sociologists. We aimed to investigate if being a member of these communities would inspire different patterns of scientific collaboration among Italian sociologists. We used a sophisticated multi-level design by using temporal community detection. We found the two largest and most stable research communities among Italian sociologists who were political and economic sociologists. We further explored the underlying mechanisms and processes of coauthorship tie existence in multi-level exponential random graph models (ERGMs) trying to take individual, community and macro levels into account in one integrated framework. We found that the collaboration ties were mainly driven by research focus while preferential attachment was also at work and highly prolific researchers attracted further coauthorship ties. In Chapter 7, we conclude by emphasising that academic work has changed drastically in 21st century. Scientific collaboration is a multi-faceted phenomenon and any effort at studying it only with one or two approaches or with one observational unit would yield reductionistic results. That was the main reason behind our effort to investigate this phenomenon from different points of views. Finally, in Appendices Chapter, how to access the data and R and Python scripts developed during this research project is described and an Annotated bibliography on different aspects of academic work is provided

How do scholars collaborate with each other? : comparative study on Co-authorship Networks of Scholars Worldwide Using Big Data

Are there any similarities and/or differences regarding how scholars collaborate with their colleagues in different universities worldwide? The aim of this research is to investigate the trends, differences, similarities and changes over time in the co-authorship networks of individual scholars. To do so, we have gathered big data from Google scholar profiles of 8377 scholars including information about all their papers and publications, their affiliation, keywords they have used to introduce their research interests on their profile. These scholars are selected from 19 universities and higher education institutions from higher ranked universities like Oxford and Harvard to be compared with lower ranked universities like the university of Milan and Tehran university in Iran that are spread worldwide. The goal is to see how authors\u2019 collaborations change over time throughout their scientific career: are there drastic changes in the recent years compared to the early years of their careers? To elicit the networks, the researcher used \u201cscholar\u201d and \u201cigraph\u201d packages in R to build a recursive crawling function to reach out to the authors' Google scholar profiles and publications as reference of collaborations. Each paper and the names of authors was seen as a single adjacency list to extract the relationships. These adjacency lists represent the tie between ego (first author of this paper) and alters (each of co-authors). If the relationship is reciprocated, it was added to the network as well. It means if one of the co-authors appeared to be the first author of another paper, the relationship changes from a one-way directed one to a two-way undirected one, showing the reciprocity of collaboration. If there was more than one collaboration between two or more authors, this was taken into account through multiple relationships. And lastly, if a paper is written by a single author, it was represented with a loop (tie to oneself). The year of publication of each paper was used and in an aggregate of papers in a year, the evolution of collaborations is compared through years in scientific career. The focus of the study is the structure of egocentric networks. Data on composition of egocentric networks is not available, although that could be another interesting research question to see if there are compositional differences of scientific networks among scholars worldwide or not? One of the main ideas here is to see how scholars are building and developing their collaboration networks. Are there differences among higher ranked scholars and universities behaviors in terms of the change in their scientific career collaborations over time with lower ranked universities' scholars? Are there differences between earlier years of scientific career, with the subsequent or later years? Are there differences among scientific fields (extracted based on research interests keywords) in the co-authorship patterns, as an example between hard sciences and social sciences? Are there statistically significant relationships among the authors\u2019 h-index and i10-index and their egocentric network properties? Are authors building distant relationships in shape of unique dyads and triads to work with multiple and more scholars to maximize their scientific proliferation or not? What about publishing in more unique journals and/or trying to publish in some particular journals repeatedly? Can we find any significant trends in the variation of number of journals papers are published in, between scholars in different universities? The study is still a work-in-progress, so far the researcher has finished the data gathering process and this abstract mostly included the network extraction procedures, and the ideas and questions that the researcher is going to answer to them based on analysis of data. The prospects of getting interesting results and the trends of how scientific collaborations develop, change and grow or shrink over time, are promising. This enables us to see how scientific collaboration among universities worldwide evolve over time

Italian sociologists: a community of disconnected groups

Examining coauthorship networks is key to study scientific collaboration patterns and structural characteristics of scientific communities. Here, we studied coauthorship networks of sociologists in Italy, using temporal and multi-level quantitative analysis. By looking at publications indexed in Scopus, we detected research communities among Italian sociologists. We found that Italian sociologists are fractured in many disconnected groups. The giant connected component could be split into five main groups with a mix of three main disciplinary topics: sociology of culture and communication (present in two groups), economic sociology (present in three groups) and general sociology (present in three groups). By applying an exponential random graph model, we found that collaboration ties are mainly driven by theresearch interestsof these groups. Other factors, such aspreferential attachment,genderandaffiliation homophilyare also important, but the effect of gender fades away once other factors are controlled for. Our research shows the advantages of multi-level and temporal network analysis in revealing the complexity of scientific collaboration patterns.Merit, Expertise and Measuremen

Internationalizing Sociology in Italy, 1970s-2010s

Italian sociologists work in a wide range of educational and research institutions located in different regions of Italy. Established hiring and promotion practices \u2013 developed through a complicated mix of top-down regulations, co-existing and conflictual \u201cparadigmatic\u201d schools and local \u201ccliques\u201d \u2013 have allowed sociologists to expand their academic influence and find positions in many institutions. For example, across Italy\u2019s universities, the number of sociology faculty is similar to that of economists (around 1,000 full, associate and assistant professors). However, while this may show our community\u2019s successful evolution it is unclear whether these practices have truly fueled excellent research, or have jeopardized it. To develop some quantitative insight into Italian sociologists\u2019 publications, we took the names of all 1,227 Italian sociologists (including post-docs enrolled in 2016) from the MIUR (Italian Ministry of University and Research) website, and then searched the Scopus data set, which includes international journals, conference proceedings, monographs and book chapters, as well as the most prestigious national journals, from the 1970s to 2010s. We found that 63.8% of Italian sociologists have at least one publication indexed in Scopus. This means that one out of three sociologists in Italy does not have a single record in recognized international journals, conference proceedings, book series or Italy\u2019s most prestigious journals. A few Italian sociologists\u2019 names appear frequently in the data set. For example, five individuals have published more than 35 indexed publications. On the other hand, about 20% (249 sociologists) have published only one article in their whole career. If we consider the impact of publications, we found that 52.4% (1,840 out of 3,515 publications) had no citations reflected in the data. Interestingly, the data suggested a geographical divide. Sociologists working in Northern (45.5%) and Central (27.2%) universities published significantly more than those working in Southern universities, suggesting either self-selection bias or a negative context effect, perhaps reflecting uneven socio-economic development across geographical regions. However, only further analysis of university hiring process, which would require reconstructing hiring committees and candidates via the MIUR database, could reveal whether this bias is more due to self-selection and homophily than to context effects. While observers of Italian academy may not be surprised at this finding, we found other interesting results when time series were included. We considered international co-authorships, which suggest sociologists are more active in the international community and so more exposed to international research standards. After counting the number of non-Italian co-authors as a proportion of the total number of co-authors for each single individual, and scaling data over time, we found that the rate of international collaborations has significantly increased in recent years, as did the number of publications. These trends are quite similar, with a growth of more than 50% of international collaborations over the past ten years (see figure). Although further analysis would require looking systematically at causal factors, this trend is probably a positive result of ANVUR (the Italian national agency for the evaluation of the university and research system) national research assessment, which was established in 2010 and assessed sociology research published from 2004. Although it takes time for scientists to adapt their publication strategies, many sociologists who were not particularly familiar with international journals probably realized the importance of publishing in well-established outlets. Alternatively, sociologists who published internationally may have decided to invest even more in international publications to pay off an initial investment. We do not want to suggest that institutional pressures have simple Darwinian effects, in which scientists simply adapt to increase their fitness. However, increased competition for funds at national and international levels and growing attention to university and department productivity could promote increased internationalization and the importance of publishing in prestigious international journals for the purposes of increasing their academic reputation. In a nutshell, we could say \u201cEppur si muove\u201d \u2013 \u201cAnd yet it moves\u201d! Direct all correspondence to Flaminio Squazzoni <[email protected]

Gender Patterns of Publication in Top Sociological Journals

This article examines publication patterns over the last seventy years from the American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology, the two most prominent journals in sociology. We reconstructed the gender of all published authors and each author\u2019s academic pedigree. Results would suggest that these journals published disproportionally more articles by male authors and their coauthors. These gender inequalities persisted even when considering citations and after controlling for the influence of academic affiliation. It would seem that the potentially positive advantage of working in a prestigious, elite sociology department, in terms of better learning environment and reputational signal, for higher publication opportunities only significantly benefits male authors. While our findings do not mean that these journals have biased internal policies or implicit practices, this publication pattern needs to be considered especially regarding the possibility of their \u201csocial closure\u201d and isomorphis

The conundrum of research productivity: a study on sociologists in Italy

This paper aims to understand the influence of institutional and organisational embeddedness on research productivity of Italian sociologists. We looked at all records published by Italian sociologists in Scopus from 1973 to 2016 and reconstructed their co-authorship patterns. We built an individual productivity index by considering the number and type of records, the impact factor of journals in which these records were published and each record\u2019s citations. We found that sociologists who co-authored more frequently with international authors were more productive and that having a stable group of co-authors had a positive effect on the number of publications but not on citations. We found that organisational embeddedness has a positive effect on productivity at the group level (i.e., sociologists working in the same institute), less at the individual level. We did not found any effect of the scientific disciplinary sectors, which are extremely influential administratively and politically for promotion and career in Italy. With all caveats due to several limitations of our analysis, our findings suggest that internationalisation and certain context-specific organisational settings could promote scientist productivity

Developing sustainable SCM evaluation model using fuzzy AHP in publishing industry

In the new econo mic context the long term success of any organization is built not only on profits and profitability but also on its contribution to the future of people and the future of the planet. Being supply chains a key cornerstone in any organization the consideration of sustainability at the supply chain level is recognized as an emerging area that needs to be studied in a systematic way. In this paper we proposed a fuzzy AHP approach for evaluating of SCM sustainability in publishing industry. For this work, we define a hierarchical framework regarding with Ageron et al model and criteria and sub criteria based on viewpoints of practical and academic experts. Results show that criteria relating with company and supplier selection factors are most important criteria

Reliability, Validity and Factor Structure of the Persian Translation of General Health Questionnire (GHQ-28) in Hospitals of Kerman University of Medical Sciences

Background & Objective: The 28-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28) consists of 4 subscales.Validation of this questionnaire has been carried out by several studies conducted in Iran. Despite the multiplicity of researches which investigated the sensitivity, specificity and reliability of this questionnaire in Iran, few studies have investigated its factor structure. However, it is important to consider if Persian translations of GHQ-28 will indicate the same 4 factors as demonstrated in forign investigations. the aim of the current research was to assess the reliability, validity and the factor structure of the Persian version of GHQ-28.Materials & Methods: The current study was designed based on a survey method. A sample of 415 employees in Kerman hospitals participated in this study and completed the questionnaires.Results: The results showed that GHQ has an appropriate internal consistency for assessing the general health in this sample. Factor analysis using principal component method identified 4 factors in participants’ responses, and these 4 factors accounted for 60% of the total variance. The correlation between GHQ total scores and the Pitsburg sleep quality index was significant at a level smaller than 0.001.Conclusion: According to the evidence of this research it is concluded that explorative factor analysis identifies four factors in the participants’ responses and the fact that this questionnire has an appropriate internal consistency and an adequate validity for the assessment of general health in this sample