Dataset Information

Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment.

ABSTRACT: Faculty at prestigious institutions produce more scientific papers, receive more citations and scholarly awards, and are typically trained at more-prestigious institutions than faculty with less prestigious appointments. This imbalance is often attributed to a meritocratic system that sorts individuals into more-prestigious positions according to their reputation, past achievements, and potential for future scholarly impact. Here, we investigate the determinants of scholarly productivity and measure their dependence on past training and current work environments. To distinguish the effects of these environments, we apply a matched-pairs experimental design to career and productivity trajectories of 2,453 early-career faculty at all 205 PhD-granting computer science departments in the United States and Canada, who together account for over 200,000 publications and 7.4 million citations. Our results show that the prestige of faculty's current work environment, not their training environment, drives their future scientific productivity, while current and past locations drive prominence. Furthermore, the characteristics of a work environment are more predictive of faculty productivity and impact than mechanisms representing preferential selection or retention of more-productive scholars by more-prestigious departments. These results identify an environmental mechanism for cumulative advantage, in which an individual's past successes are "locked in" via placement into a more prestigious environment, which directly facilitates future success. The scientific productivity of early-career faculty is thus driven by where they work, rather than where they trained for their doctorate, indicating a limited role for doctoral prestige in predicting scientific contributions.

SUBMITTER: Way SF

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6561156 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment.

Way Samuel F SF Morgan Allison C AC Larremore Daniel B DB Clauset Aaron A

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20190429 22

Faculty at prestigious institutions produce more scientific papers, receive more citations and scholarly awards, and are typically trained at more-prestigious institutions than faculty with less prestigious appointments. This imbalance is often attributed to a meritocratic system that sorts individuals into more-prestigious positions according to their reputation, past achievements, and potential for future scholarly impact. Here, we investigate the determinants of scholarly productivity and mea ...[more]

PMID: 31036658

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Project description:BackgroundMany academic medical centres have introduced strategies to assess the productivity of faculty as part of compensation schemes. We conducted a systematic review of the effects of such strategies on faculty productivity.MethodsWe searched the MEDLINE, Healthstar, Embase and PsycInfo databases from their date of inception up to October 2011. We included studies that assessed academic productivity in clinical, research, teaching and administrative activities, as well as compensation, promotion processes and satisfaction.ResultsOf 531 full-text articles assessed for eligibility, we included 9 articles reporting on eight studies. The introduction of strategies for assessing academic productivity as part of compensation schemes resulted in increases in clinical productivity (in six of six studies) in terms of clinical revenue, the work component of relative-value units (these units are nonmonetary standard units of measure used to indicate the value of services provided), patient satisfaction and other departmentally used standards. Increases in research productivity were noted (in five of six studies) in terms of funding and publications. There was no change in teaching productivity (in two of five studies) in terms of educational output. Such strategies also resulted in increases in compensation at both individual and group levels (in three studies), with two studies reporting a change in distribution of compensation in favour of junior faculty. None of the studies assessed effects on administrative productivity or promotion processes. The overall quality of evidence was low.InterpretationStrategies introduced to assess productivity as part of a compensation scheme appeared to improve productivity in research activities and possibly improved clinical productivity, but they had no effect in the area of teaching. Compensation increased at both group and individual levels, particularly among junior faculty. Higher quality evidence about the benefits and harms of such assessment strategies is needed.

Project description:ImportanceDespite equal numbers of men and women entering medical school, women are underrepresented in the upper echelons of academic medicine and receive less compensation and research funding. Citation-related publication productivity metrics, such as the h-index, are increasingly used for hiring, salary, grants, retention, promotion, and tenure decisions. Exploring sex differences in these metrics across academic medicine provides deeper insight into why differences are observed in career outcomes.ObjectiveTo systematically examine the available literature on sex differences in h-index of academic faculty physicians across all medical specialties and all levels of academic rank.Data sourcesMedical literature with the term h-index found in PubMed and published between January 1, 2009, and December 31, 2018, was used.Study selectionA PICOS (Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcomes), PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses), and MOOSE (Meta-analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology) selection protocol was used to find observational studies that published h-indexes for faculty physicians that were stratified by sex. Studies were excluded if they were review articles, retracted, or unavailable online. Ultimately, 14 of 786 studies (1.78%) met the inclusion criteria.Data extraction and synthesisData from 9 studies across 16 specialties were examined using weighted random-effects meta-analyses. Five studies were excluded because of overlapping specialties with another study or because they were missing appropriate statistics for the meta-analysis. Four of these studies were included in qualitative synthesis to bring the total to 13 studies.Main outcomes and measuresThe primary study outcome was the h-index.ResultsThe meta-analysis included 10 665 North American unique academic physicians across 9 different studies from the years 2009 to 2018. Of the 10 665 physicians, 2655 (24.89%) were women. Summary effect sizes for mean h-indexes of men and women and mean h-index difference between men and women were determined for all faculty physicians and at each academic rank. Overall, female faculty had lower h-indexes than male faculty (mean difference, -4.09; 95% CI, -5.44 to -2.73; P < .001). When adjusting for academic rank, female faculty still had lower h-indexes than male faculty at the ranks of assistant professor (mean difference, -1.3; 95% CI, -1.90 to -0.72; P < .001), associate professor (mean difference, -2.09; 95% CI, -3.40 to -0.78; P = .002), and professor (mean difference, -3.41; 95% CI, -6.24 to -0.58; P = .02).Conclusions and relevanceIn this systematic review and meta-analysis, women had lower h-indexes than men across most specialties and at all academic ranks, but it is unclear why these differences exist. These findings suggest that future investigation should be conducted regarding the causes of lower h-indexes in women and that interventions should be developed to provide a more equitable environment for all physicians regardless of sex.

Project description:IntroductionThe emergence of popular online rating websites, social media platforms, and public databases for industry payments and scholarly outputs provide a complete physician online presence which may guide choice and satisfaction.MethodsWebsites of all U.S. otolaryngology academic institutions were queried for fellowship-trained rhinologists. Additional well-known and academically active rhinologists were identified by the senior author. Online ratings and comments were collected from Google, Healthgrades, Vitals, and RateMD websites, and weighted rating scores (RS) were calculated on a 1-5 scale.ResultsA total of 210 rhinologists with 16 ± 9 years of practice were included, where 6901 online ratings (33 ± 47 per rhinologist) provided an average RS of 4.3 ± 0.6. RS was not different according to gender (p = 0.58), geographic quartile (p = 0.48), social media presence (p = 0.41), or attending top-ranked medical school (p = 0.86) or residency programs (p = 0.89). Years of practice negatively correlated with RS (R = -0.22, p<0.01), and academic ranking significantly influenced RS, with professors, associate professors, and assistant professors scoring 4.1 ± 0.6, 4.3 ± 0.4, and 4.4 ± 0.6, respectively (p = 0.03). Of the 3,304 narrative comments analyzed (3.1 ± 11.6 per rhinologist), 76% (positive) and 7% (negative) had elements of clinical knowledge/outcomes, 56% (positive) and 7% (negative) of communication/bedside manner, and 9% (positive) and 7% (negative) of office staff, cost, and wait-time. All negative comment categories had moderate negative correlation with RS, while positive comment categories regarding knowledge/competence and bedside manner weakly correlated with higher RS. Number of publications (48 ± 54) positively correlated with 2018 industry payments ($11,384 ± $19,025) among those receiving industry compensation >$300 (n = 113). Attending a top-ranked medical school was associated with higher industry payments (p<0.01) and H-index (p = 0.02).ConclusionAcademic rhinologists' online RS was not associated with gender, geographic location, or attending a top-ranked training program, and their scholarly productivity was significantly correlated with total industry payments.

Dataset Information

Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment.

Publications

Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment.

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