Which scientific elites? On the concentration of research funds, publications and citations

Using the population of all university professors (N = 13,479) in the province of Quebec, Canada, this article analyses the concentration of funding, papers and citations at the level of individual researchers. It shows that each of these distributions is different, citations being the most concentrated followed by funding, papers published and, finally, number of funded projects. Concentration measures also vary between disciplines; social sciences and humanities generally being the most concentrated. The article also shows that the correspondence between the elites defined by each of these measures is limited. In fact, only 3.2% of the researchers are in the top 10% for all indicators, while about 20% are in the top 10% for at least one of the indicators. The article concludes with a discussion of the causes of these observed differences and formulates a few hypotheses. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

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