Chapter 1 Prologue

1.1 Foreword

This dissertation aims to investigate the academic work in 21st century with a quantitative approach. It is a collection of individual articles that revolve around a general theme, i.e., understanding scientist behavior and changing patterns of collaboration, with a special attention to sociologists. We are focused on the tension between “publish or perish” from one hand and being part of the “scholarly community” on the other. The “Summary” Section clarifies the outline of the articles and introduces the reader to the subject, trying to provide a coherent picture of the main challenges of studying academic work today.

1.2 Acknowledgments

During my master studies, I started to develop an interest in studying scientific collaborations, scientist behaviour and the evolution of the scientific community. My main puzzle was to understand why sociologists in my home country, Iran, never developed a transparent reward system. Reputation, academic credit and status were not coherent with knowledge development and international standards of evaluation were not considered. Each sociologist I was being trained with in three different universities was genuinely convinced that his/her way of doing sociology was the right way, probably even the unique, whether qualitative, quantitative or – tribute paid to a modern fashion probably - mixed methods. When I proposed this subject as my master dissertation, I was unable to convince anyone of the importance of it. This is when I started studying online social networks. Indeed, in my first PhD thesis in Iran, I examined cyber social capital and resource exchange in online networks. When I started my second PhD in Brescia and Milan, my research proposal was simply a follow-up of the former. However, when I started collaborating with my supervisor, Flaminio Squazzoni, I realized that he had a deep interest in science [sociology] of science, also due to his role as chair of an ongoing COST action on peer review, i.e., PEERE. Our discussion reinvigorated my original interest in studying scientific collaboration and eventually we agreed to make this the subject of my research project. I must say that I am happy that this happened. I am deeply indebted to Flaminio’s kind help and our discussions around different aspects of the academic life in 21st century. I am even no longer able to differentiate what idea is mine and what is his here. I am indebted of his genuine collaboration in improving our research, from initial ideas to final versions of manuscripts.

I also have benefited from presenting my research project and preliminary versions of the chapters during the past three years in different venues which are presented in the “Timeline of PhD” Section. In different articles we had unique opportunity of receiving insights from knowledgeable coauthors whose names are mentioned in each chapter.

During my research visit in CWTS (Center for Science and Technology Studies), Leiden university, I was closely supervised by Vincent Traag. His helps was immense in all aspects of research from introducing up-to-date literature (e.g., to read and replicate), to his deep knowledge of cutting edge techniques and methodologies. He was ready to take my laptop and dive into the Python scripts and revise them, it all amazed me and I am greatly indebted for his kind help during my short stay in Leiden.

In UCD (University College Dublin), Dublin, I had the opportunity to discuss my research with Diane Payne, Alberto Caimo, Nial Friel and Paola Zappa. I enjoyed these discussions and I learned a lot from them. Alberto helped me in designing and carrying out statistical models for coauthorship networks, which have been included in the Chapter 6 of this thesis.

My family has always supported me during my long educational journey. I am grateful of their unconditional love and support.

During past three years I have enjoyed fruitful discussions with my colleagues in Milan, Brescia, Leiden, Dublin and Berlin, to name a few of them, I am indebted to Federico Bianchi, Dehua Gao, Davide Zampatti, Niccolò Casnici, Simone Gabbriellini, Marco Castellani, Roland Adorjáni, Rouhollah Jalili, Zohreh Zahedi, Bijan Ranjbar-Sahraei, Jochem Zuijderwijk and Paul Donner. From distance I have learned a lot from Hadley Wickham, Yihui Xie, Raffaele Vacca and amazing communities on Twitter i.e. #RStats, #Tidyverse and #AcademicTwitter.

Finally, I would like to thank very much the two external reviewers of the PhD thesis. I enjoyed reading their precise, detailed and fair comments and useful suggestions on how to improve the text.

1.3 Summary of the thesis

In recent years, higher education institutes have shifted towards managerial organisational models. Some observers see this as a sign of our neoliberal times, with obsession for rankings, performance indicators and resource allocation. The result is that academic work is more competitive nowadays. Rankings and quantitative analysis of research output are more and more crucial for hiring, promotion and funding allocations. Chapter 2 touches upon these themes and suggests the fruitfulness of cross-fertilization between sociology and science studies. To study this hyper-competitive context, we designed a complex research project to answer different questions regarding multi-faceted aspects of the subject. Our main question was to find what factors drive research collaboration and productivity. These factors are helping some researchers be more successful than others in current evaluation based system. We have employed two sets of data to achieve this goal. One national and one international, both considering the case of sociologists.

For individual research productivity measurement and to explore correlates of this productivity (Chapter 3) and macro level policy effect analysis (Chapter 4), we reconstructed the full publication list of all currently hired Italian sociologists on available data. We looked into their research productivity and how they have reacted to the ANVUR national policies by taking into account their embeddedness in different academic contexts.

Our aim in Chapter 3 was to explain individual research productivity with organisational embeddedness and we found that male scientists, those working more internationally, and those working with a similar group of coauthors were more productive but not necessarily more cited by other members of the community.

In Chapter 4, we analysed the effects of the Italian national research assessment exercise (VQR 2004-2010 by ANVUR) on research productivity and publication behavior of sociologists. Results showed that ANVUR had a limited influence on research productivity. Indeed most differences in individual research productivity of Italian sociologists were due to individual characteristics. Academics who experienced a promotion after 2010 were the most prolific authors.

To explore the structural and societal effects on research productivity of sociologists in a more competitive arena at the international level, in Chapter 5, we reconstructed gender, background information and coauthorship networks of all published authors in two top sociology journals, i.e., the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) and the American Sociological Review (ASR). We expected that examining the élite of our community could reveal interesting patterns, especially to understand certain implications of the hyper-competitive academic culture. We found that white male authors affiliated to US institutes were over-represented in these journals. We also found that male authors tended to work more in team and found trace of significant gender and ethnicity penalties.

In Chapter 6 we looked into research communities formation and evolution through the time among Italian sociologists. We aimed to investigate if being a member of these communities would inspire different patterns of scientific collaboration among Italian sociologists. We used a sophisticated multi-level design by using temporal community detection. We found the two largest and most stable research communities among Italian sociologists who were political and economic sociologists. We further explored the underlying mechanisms and processes of coauthorship tie existence in multi-level exponential random graph models (ERGMs) trying to take individual, community and macro levels into account in one integrated framework. We found that the collaboration ties were mainly driven by research focus while preferential attachment was also at work and highly prolific researchers attracted further coauthorship ties.

In Chapter 7, we conclude by emphasizing that academic work has changed drastically in 21st century. Scientific collaboration is a multi-faceted phenomenon and any effort at studying it only with one or two approaches or with one observational unit would yield reductionistic results. That was the main reason behind our effort to investigate this phenomenon from different points of views.

Finally, in Appendices Chapter, how to access the data and R and Python scripts developed during this research project is described and an Annotated bibliography on different aspects of academic work is provided.

Key Words: Academic work; Quantitative Research Evaluation; Coauthorship networks; Temporal Community Detection; ERGM; Embeddedness; Multi-level Analysis