Academic Inbreeding and Research Productivity Of Russian Faculty Members

Olga Gorelova () and Andrey Lovakov ()
Additional contact information
Olga Gorelova: National Research University Higher School of Economics
Andrey Lovakov: National Research University Higher School of Economics

HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract: The literature on the consequences of academic inbreeding shows ambiguous results: some papers show that inbreeding positively influences research productivity, measured in the quantity and quality of publications, while others show the opposite effect. There are contradictory results both in studies of different countries and within countries. Such a variety of results makes it impossible to transfer the findings from one academic system to another, and in Russia this problem has been under explored. This paper focuses on the relationship between inbreeding and publication activity among Russian faculty members. The results, using Russian data from the Changing Academic Profession survey, showed no substantial effect of academic inbreeding on research productivity. Inbred and non-inbred faculty members do not differ substantially in terms of the probability of having publications, or how many, although for inbreds such probability is slightly higher. These results are robust for different operationalizations of inbreeding and measures of publication activity. However the absence of significant differences in the number of publications may not mean the absence of a difference in their quality. The possible explanations and limitations of the standard measures of research productivity are discussed.

Keywords: Academic profession; Academic inbreeding; Research productivity; Faculty members; Russian higher education; Changing Academic Profession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-cse, nep-eff and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in WP BRP Series: Education / EDU, May 2016, pages 1-37

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.hse.ru/data/2016/05/10/1129312878/32EDU2016.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hig:wpaper:32edu2016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shamil Abdulaev () and Shamil Abdulaev ().