Publication Productivity and professional position : cross-National evidence on the role of organisations

Abstract

Studies of stratification in science have increasingly accepted the idea that science is highly stratified and elitist system with skewed distributions of productivity and rewards. Attempts to explain the higher productivity of higher status scientists by pointing to their greater ease of publication as fur as acceptance of their work by journaIs and publishers is concerned were not supported by the data in some recent studies. If status in general does not confer greater ease of publication the present paper argues that position within a research organization does confer greater ease of author - or co-authorship - and this is the major explanatory variable accounting for productivity differences within research laboratories as far as quantity of articles (and books) is concerned. Upward moves in a laboratory's formal or informal position hierarchy are associated with a change of a scientist's research involvement from goal executing to goal setting functions as well as with an increasing access to scientific manpower and project money. Goal setting tasks provide for a significant reduction of time-expenditures in research necessary to assure that the scientist is identified with the research results; consequently, they allow for an involvement in more research tasks than originally. Equivalently, resources in scientific manpower and project money act as a multiplying element as fur as quantity of output is concerned.