Page 12 - IDEA Study 02 2020 Recruitment of Researchers

WHERE DO UNIVERSITIES RECRUIT RESEARCHERS? 2020 The main limitation The results presented do not reflect academic inbreeding per se. We do not know whether the researcher only published one of her initial articles with an affiliation to the university in which she is currently based, or whether this is also her alma mater. If she actually graduated from her current academic employer, this is inbreeding in the true sense, but otherwise it is not. Publishing practices matter. In disciplines in which frequency of publishing is high and doctoral students customarily publish under the heading of their alma mater, (typically natural sciences) our indicator is close to measuring inbreeding. Conversely, in disciplines in which publishing frequency is low and doctoral students often publish only after finishing their studies (typically social sciences and mathematics), the difference is likely to be notable. Waaijer et al. (2016) show that for U.S. doctorate recipients in 1950–2010, the median publication of the first article was before the year their doctorate was granted in astrophysics, chemistry, genetics and psychology, and after that year in economics. Based on a sample of the U.S. doctoral students receiving doctorates between 1965 and 1995, Lee (2000) found that the share of those who had already published at least one journal article during their studies ranged between 64 and 86% in analytical chemistry, 45 and 60% in experimental psychology, but only 7 and 35% in American literature. In a database of all doctoral students in Quebec over the 2000–2007 period, Lariviére (2012) found that the share of those with at least one published paper was 63% in health sciences, 40% in natural sciences and engineering, 11% in social sciences and 4% in arts and humanities. The differences between disciplines are indeed significant. In addition, the acceptable practice for claiming affiliations in papers when entering the labour market after graduation matters. In some disciplines, notably economics, it is customary in the global (or American) labour market to publish a dissertation paper only under the heading of the first employer, even when the research was conducted elsewhere. In these cases, our indicator will significantly overestimate inbreeding. Finally, it is important to take into account how much doctoral students are pressed to publish articles in indexed journals. If this is required (explicitly or not) before a student is allowed to defend her thesis, our indicator captures the extent of inbreeding. In contrast, in environments that are more relaxed with regards to publishing demands on doctoral students, we may be far off the mark for identifying a link to the alma mater. Because the pressure to publish increases over time (not only on doctoral students), it is interesting to compare our results for senior and junior researchers. Overall, therefore, it is important to acknowledge that our indicator conflates the tendency to inbreeding in the sense of a researcher being based at the same university from which she graduated, and career persistence in the sense of remaining employed at the same university where the researcher took her initial job. This is a general indicator of researchers’ (im)mobility, which, depending on circumstances, more or less correlates to inbreeding. 10