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

Abstract

In this work 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 previous 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 academia administrators on the role of older professors.

References in corpus (10)

• Gender differences in research productivity: a bibliometric analysis of the Italian academic system
• A heuristic approach to author name disambiguation in bibliometrics databases for large-scale research assessments
• Research productivity: are higher academic ranks more productive than lower ones?
• The contribution of star scientists to overall sex differences in research productivity
• What is the appropriate length of the publication period over which to assess research performance?
• Individual research performance: a proposal for comparing apples to oranges
• Career advancement and scientific performance in universities
• Variation in research collaboration patterns across academic ranks
• How important is choice of the scaling factor in standardizing citations?
• Variability of research performance across disciplines within universities in non-competitive higher education systems

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The relationship among research productivity, research collaboration, and their determinants
• The effects of gender, age and academic rank on research diversification
• The Young and the Old, the Fast and the Slow: A Large-Scale Study of Productivity Classes and Rank Advancement
• Studying the characteristics of scientific communities using individual-level bibliometrics: the case of Big Data research