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Tenure is a cornerstone of the US academic system, yet its relationship to faculty research trajectories remains poorly understood. Conceptually, tenure systems may act as a selection mechanism, screening in high-output researchers; a…
Science prizes purportedly reward innovation and explorations of new phenomena. Yet, in practice prizes may inadvertently divert resources from similarly impactful but less celebrated scholars. Despite this paradox, knowledge of how…
Faculty at prestigious institutions dominate scientific discourse, with the small proportion of researchers at elite universities producing a disproportionate share of all research publications. Environmental prestige is known to drive such…
Institutions widely use student evaluations to assess the faculty's teaching performance, but underlying trends and biases can influence their interpretation. Using data from Rate My Professors, we conduct the largest and most recent…
A scientist may publish tens or hundreds of papers over a career, but these contributions are not evenly spaced in time. Sixty years of studies on career productivity patterns in a variety of fields suggest an intuitive and universal…
The literature on gender differences in research performance seems to suggest a gap between men and women, where the former outperform the latter. Whether one agrees with the different factors proposed to explain the phenomenon, it is…
Research projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and external partnerships, but what role does funding play in their formation? Here, we examined over 43,000 funded projects in the past three decades, enabling us to…
This longitudinal study explores persistence in research productivity over time. We examine the trajectories of the academic careers of 2,326 current full professors in 14 STEMM disciplines, studying their lifetime biographical histories…
Unlike competitive higher education systems, non-competitive systems show relatively uniform distributions of top professors and low performers among universities. In this study, we examine the impact of unproductive and top faculty members…
We develop a method to estimate producers' productivity beliefs when output quantities and input prices are unobservable, and we use it to evaluate the market for science. Our model of researchers' labor supply shows how their willingness…
This work investigates the research performance of foreign faculty in the Italian academic system. Incoming professors compose l'1% of total faculty across the sciences, although with variations by discipline. Their scientific performance…
In the context of scientific policy and science management, this study examines the system of nonuniform wage distribution for researchers. A nonlinear mathematical model of optimal remuneration for scientific workers has been developed,…
While the Internet has dramatically increased the exposure that research can receive, it has also facilitated harassment against scholars. To understand the impact that these attacks can have on the work of researchers, we perform a series…
This work analyses the links between individual research performance and academic rank. A typical bibliometric methodology is used to study the performance of all Italian university researchers active in the hard sciences, for the period…
Observational studies often present challenges for causal inference due to confounding and heterogeneity. In this paper, we illustrate how modern causal inference methods can be applied to large-scale academic salary data. Using records…
Understanding how institutional changes within academia may affect the overall potential of science requires a better quantitative representation of how careers evolve over time. Since knowledge spillovers, cumulative advantage,…
This study is about public-private research collaboration. In particular, we want to measure how the propensity of academics to collaborate with their colleagues from private firms varies over time and whether the typical profile of such…
The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First,…
A common expectation is that career productivity peaks rather early and then gradually declines with seniority. But whether this holds true is still an open question. Here we investigate the productivity trajectories of almost 8,500…
University-industry research collaboration is one of the major research policy priorities of advanced economies. In this study, we try to identify the main drivers that could influence the propensity of academics to engage in research…