Within- and between-department variability in individual productivity: the case of economics

Antonio Perianes-Rodriguez and Javier Ruiz-Castillo
Additional contact information
Antonio Perianes-Rodriguez: Universidad Carlos III

Scientometrics, 2015, vol. 102, issue 2, No 21, 1497-1520

Abstract: Abstract In the social sciences, university departments are the governance units where the demand for and the supply of researchers interact. As a first step towards a formal model of this process, this paper investigates the characteristics of productivity distributions in a unique dataset consisting of 2,530 faculty members with at least one publication who were working in the 81 top world Economics departments in 2007. Individual productivity is measured in two ways: as the number of publications up to 2007, and as a quality index that weights differently the articles published in four journal equivalent classes. The academic age of individuals, measured as the number of years since obtaining a Ph.D. up to 2007, is used to measure productivity per year. Independently of the two productivity measures, and both before and after age normalization, the five main findings of the paper are the following. Firstly, individuals within each department have very different productivities. Secondly, there is not a single pattern of productivity inequality and skewness at the department level. On the contrary, productivity distributions are very different across departments. Thirdly, the effect on overall productivity inequality of differences in productivity distributions between departments is greater than the analogous effect in other contexts. Fourth, to a large extent, this effect on overall productivity inequality is accounted for by scale factors well captured by departments’ mean productivities. Fifth, this high degree of departmental heterogeneity is found to be compatible with greater homogeneity across the members of a partition of the sample into seven countries and a residual category.

Keywords: Scientific productivity distributions; Within- and between-group variability; Economics departments; Academic age (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-014-1449-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:scient:v:102:y:2015:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-014-1449-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-014-1449-6

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().