Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment
Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1817431116
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发表时间：
2019-05-28
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Clauset, Aaron
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Way, Samuel F.;Morgan, Allison C.;Clauset, Aaron
知名机构的教员会发表更多的科学论文，获得更多的引用和学术奖项，并且通常比职位不太知名的教员在更具声望的机构接受培训。这种不平衡往往归因于一种精英制度，该制度根据个人的声誉、过去的成就以及未来学术影响力的潜力将他们分配到更具声望的职位。在此，我们研究学术生产力的决定因素，并衡量它们对过去培训和当前工作环境的依赖程度。为了区分这些环境的影响，我们对美国和加拿大所有205个授予博士学位的计算机科学系的2453名早期职业教员的职业和生产力轨迹采用了配对实验设计，这些教员总共发表了超过20万篇论文，被引用740万次。我们的研究结果表明，教员当前工作环境的声望，而非其培训环境，推动了他们未来的科学生产力，而当前和过去的工作地点则推动了其知名度。此外，工作环境的特征比代表更具声望的部门优先选拔或留住更具生产力的学者的机制更能预测教员的生产力和影响力。这些结果确定了一种累积优势的环境机制，在这种机制中，个人过去的成功通过被安置在一个更具声望的环境中而被“锁定”，这直接促进了未来的成功。因此，早期职业教员的科学生产力是由他们工作的地方，而非他们攻读博士学位的培训地点所驱动，这表明博士学位的声望在预测科学贡献方面作用有限。
Faculty at prestigious institutions produce more scientific papers, receive more citations and scholarly awards, and are typically trained at more-prestigious institutions than faculty with less prestigious appointments. This imbalance is often attributed to a meritocratic system that sorts individuals into more-prestigious positions according to their reputation, past achievements, and potential for future scholarly impact. Here, we investigate the determinants of scholarly productivity and measure their dependence on past training and current work environments. To distinguish the effects of these environments, we apply a matched-pairs experimental design to career and productivity trajectories of 2,453 early-career faculty at all 205 PhD-granting computer science departments in the United States and Canada, who together account for over 200,000 publications and 7.4 million citations. Our results show that the prestige of faculty's current work environment, not their training environment, drives their future scientific productivity, while current and past locations drive prominence. Furthermore, the characteristics of a work environment are more predictive of faculty productivity and impact than mechanisms representing preferential selection or retention of more-productive scholars by more-prestigious departments. These results identify an environmental mechanism for cumulative advantage, in which an individual's past successes are "locked in" via placement into a more prestigious environment, which directly facilitates future success. The scientific productivity of early-career faculty is thus driven by where they work, rather than where they trained for their doctorate, indicating a limited role for doctoral prestige in predicting scientific contributions.