The combined effects of age and seniority on research performance of full professors

In this paper we examine the relationship between research performance, age, and seniority in academic rank of full professors in the Italian academic system. Differently from a large part of the literature, our results generally show a negative monotonic relationship between age and research performance, in all the disciplines under analysis. We also highlight a positive relationship between seniority in rank and performance, occurring particularly in certain disciplines. While in medicine, biology, and chemistry this result could be explained by the ‘accumulative advantage’ effect, in other disciplines, like civil engineering, and pedagogy and psychology, it could be due to the existence of a large performance differential between young and mature researchers, at the moment of the promotion to full professors. These results, witnessed both generally and at the level of the individual disciplines, offer useful insights for policy makers and administrators in academia on the role of older professors.

[1]  Alan R. Hedley,et al.  Productivity of Full Professors Before and After Promotion: The Case of the University of Victoria* , 1987 .

[2]  George D. Kuh,et al.  The "Writing Wing": Characteristics of Prolific Contributors to the Higher Education Literature , 1987 .

[3]  Wolfgang Stroebe,et al.  The graying of academia: will it reduce scientific productivity? , 2010, The American psychologist.

[4]  Robert T. Blackburn,et al.  Faculty careers: Maturation, demographic, and historical effects , 1985 .

[5]  Flora F. Tien,et al.  To What Degree Does the Desire for Promotion Motivate Faculty to Perform Research? Testing the Expectancy Theory , 2000 .

[6]  Svein Kyvik,et al.  Age and scientific productivity. Differences between fields of learning , 1990 .

[7]  Paul H. Thompson,et al.  A Longitudinal Study of Technological Obsolescence , 1975 .

[8]  Giovanni Abramo,et al.  Research productivity: Are higher academic ranks more productive than lower ones? , 2011, Scientometrics.

[9]  Robert T. Blackburn,et al.  Research Note: Correlates of Faculty Publications. , 1978 .

[10]  Tindaro Cicero,et al.  Individual research performance: A proposal for comparing apples to oranges , 2013, J. Informetrics.

[11]  Nancy Stern,et al.  Age and Achievement in Mathematics: A Case-Study in the Sociology of Science , 1978 .

[12]  Giovanni Abramo,et al.  The contribution of star scientists to overall sex differences in research productivity , 2009, Scientometrics.

[13]  Narayanan Srinivasan,et al.  The Optimal Age to Start a Revolution , 2007 .

[14]  F. Veloso,et al.  The determinants of research output and impact: A study of Mexican researchers , 2007 .

[15]  Vinod Mishra,et al.  Are more senior academics really more research productive than junior academics? Evidence from Australian law schools , 2013, Scientometrics.

[16]  A. Van Heeringen,et al.  The relationships between age, mobility and scientific productivity. Part I , 1987, Scientometrics.

[17]  Thed N. van Leeuwen,et al.  A bibliometric classificatory approach for the study and assessment of research performance at the individual level: The effects of age on productivity and impact , 2010, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[18]  David A. Katz.  Faculty Salaries, Promotion, and Productivity at a Large University , 1973 .

[19]  Arthur M. Diamond,et al.  An economic model of the life-cycle research productivity of scientists , 1984, Scientometrics.

[20]  L. Butler,et al.  Assessing university research: A plea for a balanced approach , 2007 .

[21]  Tindaro Cicero,et al.  How important is choice of the scaling factor in standardizing citations? , 2012, J. Informetrics.

[22]  Svein Kyvik,et al.  Child Care, Research Collaboration, and Gender Differences in Scientific Productivity , 1996 .

[23]  Stephen Cole,et al.  Age and Scientific Performance , 1979, American Journal of Sociology.

[24]  Hanna-Mari Puuska,et al.  Effects of scholar’s gender and professional position on publishing productivity in different publication types. Analysis of a Finnish university , 2010, Scientometrics.

[25]  Michael S. McPherson,et al.  The American Academic Profession: A Synthesis of Social Scientific Inquiry Since World War II , 1985 .

[26]  J. Hicks,et al.  The economics of science , 1996 .

[27]  Giovanni Abramo,et al.  Variation in research collaboration patterns across academic ranks , 2014, Scientometrics.

[28]  Jacques Mairesse,et al.  Individual Productivity Differences in Public Research : How important are non-individual determinants? An Econometric Study of French Physicists' publications and citations (1986-1997)* , 2005 .

[29]  Josann Duane,et al.  Faculty Mentoring Faculty in a Public University , 1991 .

[30]  John K. Butler,et al.  Extrinsic Reward Valences and Productivity of Business Faculty: A within-and between-Subjects Decision Modeling Experiment , 1989 .

[31]  Flora F. Tien,et al.  Faculty Rank System, Research Motivation, and Faculty Research Productivity: Measure Refinement and Theory Testing , 1996 .

[32]  Cinzia Daraio,et al.  The case of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) , 2003 .

[33]  Terje Bruen Olsen,et al.  Does the aging of tenured academic staff affect the research performance of universities? , 2008, Scientometrics.

[34]  Paula E. Stephan,et al.  Research Productivity over the Life Cycle: Evidence for Academic Scientists , 1991 .

[35]  Stephen Cole,et al.  Social Stratification in Science , 1974 .

[36]  K. D. Knorr,et al.  Publication productivity and professional position: Cross-national evidence on the role of organizations , 1980, Scientometrics.

[37]  Leslie E. Papke,et al.  Econometric Methods for Fractional Response Variables with an Application to 401(K) Plan Participation Rates , 1993 .

[38]  Tindaro Cicero,et al.  What is the appropriate length of the publication period over which to assess research performance? , 2012, Scientometrics.

[39]  Cinzia Daraio,et al.  Age effects in scientific productivity , 2003, Scientometrics.

[40]  Nicolas Carayol,et al.  Individual and collective determinants of academic scientists' productivity , 2006, Inf. Econ. Policy.

[41]  Henk F. Moed,et al.  Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation , 1899 .

[42]  H. Akaike,et al.  Information Theory and an Extension of the Maximum Likelihood Principle , 1973 .

[43]  Eugene Garfield,et al.  Is citation analysis a legitimate evaluation tool? , 2005, Scientometrics.

[44]  Frank Verboven,et al.  The Internal Economics of a University - Evidence from Personnel Data , 2010 .

[45]  J. Mincer.  Schooling, Experience, and Earnings , 1976 .

[46]  K. Schaie.  The course of adult intellectual development. , 1994, The American psychologist.

[47]  A. van de Rijt,et al.  The Matthew effect in science funding , 2018, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[48]  R. Over,et al.  Does research productivity decline with age? , 1982 .

[49]  Giovanni Abramo,et al.  Gender differences in research productivity: A bibliometric analysis of the Italian academic system , 2009, Scientometrics.

[50]  Paula E. Stephan,et al.  Striking the Mother Lode in Science: The Importance of Age, Place, and Time, , 1994 .

[51]  Robert T. Blackburn,et al.  Age as a Predictor of Faculty Productivity: Three Conceptual Approaches. , 1988 .

[52]  Monica Gaughan,et al.  How do men and women differ in research collaborations? An analysis of the collaborative motives and strategies of academic researchers☆ , 2011 .

[53]  S. Cole.  Making Science: Between Nature and Society , 1992 .

[54]  Michele Pezzoni,et al.  Scientific Productivity and Academic Promotion: A Study on French and Italian Physicists. NBER Working Paper No. 16341. , 2010 .

[55]  Jeffrey Pfeffer,et al.  Publication and Prestige Mobility of University Departments in Three Scientific Disciplines. , 1976 .

[56]  H. Lehman,et al.  Age and Achievement , 1953 .

[57]  Vincent Larivière,et al.  Sex differences in research funding, productivity and impact: an analysis of Québec university professors , 2011, Scientometrics.

[58]  Giovanni Abramo,et al.  Measuring science: irresistible temptations, easy shortcuts and dangerous consequences , 2018, ArXiv.

[59]  R. Over,et al.  Does scholarly impact decline with age? , 1988, Scientometrics.

[60]  A. Van Heeringen,et al.  The relationships between age, mobility and scientific productivity. Part II , 2005, Scientometrics.

[61]  J. McDowell,et al.  Obsolescence of Knowledge and Career Publication Profiles: Some Evidence of Differences among Fields in Costs of Interrupted Careers , 1982 .

[62]  Cristiano Giuffrida,et al.  A heuristic approach to author name disambiguation in bibliometrics databases for large-scale research assessments , 2011, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[63]  Alan E. Bayer,et al.  Career Age and Research-Professional Activities of Academic Scientists. Tests of Alternative Nonlinear Models and Some Implications for Higher Education Faculty Policies. , 1977 .

[64]  F. Lissoni,et al.  Career progress in centralized academic systems: Social capital and institutions in France and Italy , 2012 .

[65]  David Arenberg,et al.  Adult life span changes in immediate visual memory and verbal intelligence. , 1995, Psychology and aging.

[66]  D. McFadden.  Conditional logit analysis of qualitative choice behavior , 1972 .

[67]  P. Allison,et al.  Productivity Differences Among Scientists: Evidence for Accumulative Advantage , 1974 .

[68]  Giovanni Abramo,et al.  Career advancement and scientific performance in universities , 2014, Scientometrics.

[69]  Harriet Zuckerman,et al.  Age, aging, and age structure in science , 1968 .

[70]  Giovanni Abramo,et al.  Variability of research performance across disciplines within universities in non-competitive higher education systems , 2014, Scientometrics.

[71]  Michel Zitt,et al.  Relativity of citation performance and excellence measures: From cross-field to cross-scale effects of field-normalisation , 2005, Scientometrics.

[72]  A. Diamond,et al.  The life-cycle research productivity of mathematicians and scientists. , 1986, Journal of gerontology.

[73]  J. S. Long,et al.  Measures of Sex Differences in Scientific Productivity , 1992 .

[74]  S. Joy,et al.  What Should I Be Doing, and Where Are They Doing It? Scholarly Productivity of Academic Psychologists , 2006, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[75]  Ulf Sandström,et al.  Meeting the Micro-Level Challenges : Bibliometrics at the Individual Level , 2009 .

[76]  Dean Keith Simonton,et al.  Creative productivity: A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks. , 1997 .

[77]  Reinhilde Veugelers,et al.  The great divide in scientific productivity: why the average scientist does not exist , 2011 .

[78]  Y. Gingras,et al.  The Effects of Aging on Researchers' Publication and Citation Patterns , 2008, PloS one.

[79]  Giovanni Abramo,et al.  Assessment of sectoral aggregation distortion in research productivity measurements , 2008 .

[80]  Paula E. Stephan,et al.  Age and research productivity of academic scientists , 1989 .

[81]  Jung Cheol Shin,et al.  Multilevel analysis of academic publishing across disciplines: research preference, collaboration, and time on research , 2010, Scientometrics.