Page 7 - IDEA Study 02 2020 Recruitment of Researchers

WHERE DO UNIVERSITIES RECRUIT RESEARCHERS? 2020 Introduction Top universities hire researchers from the global labour market. In such institutions, internal candidates could be even ineligible to apply for open positions to limit the so-called ‘academic inbreeding’. Attracting new talent from outside brings new ideas, approaches and collaborations, and is vital for sustaining research excellence. How could we measure the extent to which universities hire researchers from outside? Does the tendency to employ researchers originally from the same place markedly differ across universities from different countries? How does this tendency differ across disciplines and over time? Box 1: Academic Inbreeding Hiring from within, or ‘academic inbreeding’, refers to a tendency of universities to recruit their own graduates for academic positions. Excessive hiring from within is considered unhealthy in the academic environment, because it restricts the inflow of fresh ideas and leads to imitation or ‘parroting’ rather than originality. How much of hiring from within is natural and from what point it becomes detrimental varies between disciplines, the maturity of the particular research topic and the developmental level of the university system. However, engaging in cutting-edge research increasingly requires cross-fertilization of knowledge from variegated origins, which is why top universities are continuously on a quest to attract new talent from outside. For more detailed discussion on this topic, see Gorelov and Yudkevich (2015), Horta (2013), Horta and Yudkevich (2016), and Inanc and Tuncer (2011). From the author affiliations in the Scopus citation database, we found how many researchers are currently based at the same university where they were affiliated at the beginning of their research careers. The researchers who published at least one article with affiliation to their current university during the first twelve months of their publication activity are marked as originating from the same place. If their initial articles were published under a different organization, we traced whether this was in the same country or abroad. Based on this data, we divided current researchers into three groups: those who are currently affiliated with the same university where they began, those who are with another institution in the same country, and those now at a foreign organization. The comparison includes evidence from eighteen major universities in fourteen countries, including the new EU member countries of the Visegrad group. The results are presented for eleven large disciplines that are sufficiently represented in the universities in the study. This analysis is original and its results are not available elsewhere. The findings should be of interest not only to academics who are based at these universities, but also to policy-makers and to the broader public. The results should also be of interest to current and prospective students at the universities, especially those in doctoral programmes, as the results signal their own outlooks for finding a research job on the global labour market. Admittedly, structural aspects of human resources management of this kind tend to be all too often underrated in evaluations of research organizations, even though they are perhaps among the most important factors in long-term development of universities. 5