Publication productivity of Polish scientists in a longitudinal perspective: doctoral and postdoctoral career stages

Abstract

In our study, we approach scientific productivity in a longitudinal perspective, tracking the careers of scientists over time (for up to 40 years). First, we classify scientists into decile-based classes of publication productivity – from the lowest 10% to the highest 10%. We then analyze mobility patterns between these classes at two stages of academic career: before and after habilitation degree (i.e., with only a PhD and with only habilitation degree). Our results confirm that radical changes in the level of publication productivity (both increases and decreases) do not occur in the Polish science system, similarly to other highly developed countries. Researchers with a very weak publication record to date have little chance of achieving very high productivity in the future, regardless of their field of science (within STEMM fields: science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine). Our research indicates a long-term nature of academic careers: publication productivity at the pre-habilitation stage strongly influences productivity in the more independent period of academic work at the post-habilitation stage. We use microdata on academic careers (from the OPI PIB database) and metadata on publications (from the raw Scopus database). Polish scientists with habilitation degree often remain in their assigned productivity classes for many years: researchers with very high publication productivity maintain their status, as do researchers with very low productivity. The results of logistic regression analysis strongly support our two-dimensional findings. The study covers all Polish scientists with habilitation degree visible on the international stage through scientific articles indexed in the Scopus database in five STEMM fields (N = 4165; Nart = 71,841 articles).