7 research outputs found
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
An investigation on the skewness patterns and fractal nature of research productivity distributions at field and discipline level
The paper provides an empirical examination of how research productivity
distributions differ across scientific fields and disciplines. Productivity is
measured using the FSS indicator, which embeds both quantity and impact of
output. The population studied consists of over 31,000 scientists in 180 fields
(10 aggregate disciplines) of a national research system. The Characteristic
Scores and Scale technique is used to investigate the distribution patterns for
the different fields and disciplines. Research productivity distributions are
found to be asymmetrical at the field level, although the degree of skewness
varies substantially among the fields within the aggregate disciplines. We also
examine whether the field productivity distributions show a fractal nature,
which reveals an exception more than a rule. Differently, for the disciplines,
the partitions of the distributions show skewed patterns that are highly
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