Anthony J. Olejniczak

Research universities and influential ranking systems frequently combine the visual and performing arts with the humanities into a single "Arts and Humanities" category for evaluation. This common aggregation is problematic, creating an inequitable and distorted view of the scholarly contributions from both domains. We advocate a more nuanced approach, highlighting a significant divergence in scholarly output between these fields. Our analysis of publication data reveals distinct rhythms : humanities scholars typically publish more rapidly than arts faculty (although both publish far less than their STEM discipline counterparts). Visual and performing arts faculty who publish histories, criticisms, and analyses exhibit a much slower tempo of article publication over the same periods. This difference stems from fundamental distinctions in disciplinary activities. Evaluating visual and performing arts units using metrics calibrated for “lettered humanities” scholars imposes an inappropriate standard, misrepresenting their productivity and devaluing their core contributions. We urge data providers to disaggregate the "Arts and Humanities" category and university administrators to adopt discipline-sensitive evaluation incorporating qualitative indicators for equitable assessment and sound strategic planning.

This study was undertaken to examine the impact of age and gender on faculty career progression in academia and to identify key performance indicators leading to attaining promotion. To explore any evidence of age-gender effect on faculty career progression, gender compositions, promotion rates, and appointment lengths at the assistant and associate professor levels are investigated. Furthermore, the underlying factors influencing faculty performance evaluation decisions are analyzed using the commercial data provided by Academic Analytics, LLC, which comprises the scholarly records of 336 793 faculty members from 472 Ph.D.-granting universities in the United States during 2011-2020. Various machine learning techniques, including ensemble learning and association rule mining, are performed to determine the important features that provide the most significant insights into academic career growth. Our results indicate strong evidence of age-gender effect on faculty career advancement and underscore the significance of journal article and citation counts for career progression in higher education.

Some states in the U.S. have traditionally received less federal research funding than other states. The National Science Foundation (NSF) created a program in 1979, called the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) to enhance the research competitiveness in such states. While the geographic disparity in federal research funding is well known, the overall impact of federal funding on the research performance of EPSCoR and non-EPSCoR has not been previously studied. In the current study, we compared the combined research productivity of Ph.D. granting institutions in EPSCoR versus the non-EPSCoR states to better understand the scientific impact of federal investments in sponsored research across all states. The research outputs we measured included journal articles, books, conference papers, patents, and citation count in academic literature. Unsurprisingly, results indicated that the non-EPSCoR states received significantly more federal research funding than their EPSCoR counterparts, which correlated with a higher number of faculty members in the non-EPSCoR versus EPSCoR states. Also, in the overall research productivity expressed on a per capita, the non-EPSCoR states fared better than EPSCoR states. However, when the research output was measured based on per $1M investment of federal research funding, EPSCoR states performed significantly better than the non-EPSCoR states in many research productivity indicators, with the notable exception of patents. Together, this study found preliminary evidence that EPSCoR states achieved a high degree of research productivity despite receiving significantly fewer federal research dollars. The limitations and next steps of this study are also discussed.

Some states in the U.S. have traditionally received less federal research funding than other states. The National Science Foundation (NSF) created a program in 1979, called the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) to enhance the research competitiveness in such EPSCoR states. While it is well established that the EPSCoR states receive significantly less federal research funding than non-EPSCoR states, the overall impact of federal funding on research performance of EPSCoR and non-EPSCoR has not been previously studied. In the current study, we compared the combined research productivity of Ph.D. granting institutions in EPSCoR versus the non-EPSCoR states to better understand the scientific impact of the federal investments in sponsored research across all states. The research outputs we measured included journal articles and books published, citations of journal articles, presentations at scientific conferences, and patents. Unsurprisingly, results indicated that the non-EPSCoR states received significantly more federal research funding than their EPSCoR counterparts, which correlated with higher number of faculty members in the non-EPSCoR vs EPSCoR states. Also, in the overall research productivity expressed on per capita basis, the non-EPSCoR states fared better than EPSCoR states. However, when the research output was measured based on per $1M investment of federal research funding, EPSCoR states were found to perform significantly better than the non-EPSCoR states in all research productivity indicators except patents. Together, this study found preliminary evidence that EPSCoR states performed very well in overall research productivity despite receiving significantly fewer federal research dollars. Limitations and next steps of this study are discussed.

The number of scholarly journal articles published each year is growing, but little is known about the relationship between journal article growth and other forms of scholarly dissemination (e.g., books and monographs). Journal articles are the de facto currency of evaluation and prestige in STEM fields, but social scientists routinely publish books as well as articles, representing a unique opportunity to study increased article publications in disciplines with other dissemination options. We studied the publishing activity of social science faculty members in 12 disciplines at 290 Ph.D. granting institutions in the United States between 2011 and 2019, asking: 1) have publication practices changed such that more or fewer books and articles are written now than in the recent past?; 2) has the percentage of scholars actively participating in a particular publishing type changed over time?; and 3) do different age cohorts evince different publication strategies? In all disciplines, journal articles per person increased between 3% and 64% between 2011 and 2019, while books per person decreased by at least 31% and as much as 54%. All age cohorts show increased article authorship over the study period, and early career scholars author more articles per person than the other cohorts in eight disciplines. The article-dominated literatures of the social sciences are becoming increasingly similar to those of STEM disciplines.

Over the past few years, the rate of journal article publication has increased in most academic disciplines - in some cases more than doubling in the past decade. While journal articles are the de facto currency of knowledge production in many science disciplines, social science scholars routinely publish books as well as journal articles. The social sciences have also undergone a rapid transformation towards more quantitative methodologies, thus representing a unique opportunity to study the increased rate of journal article publication in an area where books are also an important mode of dissemination. We studied the publishing activity of social sciences faculty members in 12 disciplines at 290 Ph.D. granting institutions in the United States between 2011 and 2019. In all disciplines, journal articles per person increased between 2011 and 2019 by between 3% and 64%, while books per person decreased by at least 31% and as much as 54%. Overall, early career researchers show the largest increase in rates of journal article production, while senior scholars show the greatest increase in participation in journal article production. Younger scholars appear to have greater publication output, while growing numbers of older scholars turn towards journal articles as a means of disseminating their work in the social sciences. We observe growing uniformity in the disciplinary literatures of the social sciences, which increasingly resemble the physical and biological sciences in terms of publication practices.

In the tables presented here (https://osf.io/myaut/), we show data pertaining to publication rates and publication venues across 170 academic disciplines. We model the publication patterns of faculty members at U.S. research universities at different career stages, and in so doing we hope to provide a nuanced and up-to-date reference for faculty members, administrators, and staff charged with interpreting publication outputs across disciplines and in a comparative context. Not all active scholars in any field will follow the same pattern of publication, and not all articles or books are of equal value: these data do not reflect quality measures. Our goal is not to establish a template against which individual scholars should be measured, but to contextualize a general picture of publication patterns representative of each discipline, with the knowledge that there will be notable individual variations.

The aging of the professoriate throughout the end of the twentieth century and the early years of the 2000′s (both before and after the end of mandatory retirement in the United States, ca. 1994) has become a source of concern for some scholars and research administrators, who posit that the “greying” of the academy results in lower research activity and a decline in scientific advancement. Some published opinions concur that senior scholars’ research programs do not keep pace with those of their younger colleagues, but little quantitative evidence has been presented to evaluate that claim. In this study, we quantify senior faculty publication activity in six broad fields, comparing their publication rates to their younger colleagues across four modes of knowledge dissemination: journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and book chapters. Career publication activity does not follow the “peak and decline” pattern described in earlier studies. In most fields, journal article publication rates do not decline substantively with age (and in some cases article publication rates are higher among senior scholars), conference proceeding publication rates tend to decline with age, while book and chapter publication rates increase markedly with age. Overall, senior scholars maintain publishing activity levels and tend to shift their focus to the development and evolution of ideas through the publication of longer-format works as books and book chapters.

The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular subset of scholars—those with access to resources enabling them to afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by 182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional characteristics at American research universities across 11 broad fields of study. The results show, in general, that the likelihood for a scholar to author an APC OA article increases with male gender, employment at a prestigious institution (AAU member universities), association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding, and more advanced career stage (i.e., higher professorial rank). Participation in APC OA publishing appears to be skewed toward scholars with greater access to resources and job security.

The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular subset of scholars - those with access to resources enabling them to afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by 182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional characteristics at American research universities across 11 broad fields of study. Results show, in general, that the likelihood for a scholar to author an APC OA article increases with male gender, employment at a prestigious institution (AAU member universities), association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding, and more advanced career stage (i.e., higher professorial rank). Participation in APC OA publishing appears to be skewed toward scholars with greater access to resources and job security.