Abstract
The association between productivity and impact of scientific production is a long-standing debate in science that remains controversial and poorly understood. Here we present a large-scale analysis of the association between yearly publication numbers and average journal-impact metrics for the Brazilian scientific elite. We find this association to be discipline-specific, career-age dependent, and similar among researchers with outlier and non-outlier performance. Outlier researchers either outperform in productivity or journal prestige, but they rarely do so in both categories. Non-outliers also follow this trend and display negative correlations between productivity and journal prestige but with discipline-dependent intensity. Our research indicates that academics are averse to simultaneous changes in their productivity and journal-prestige levels over consecutive career years. We also find that career patterns concerning productivity and journal prestige are discipline-specific, having in common a raise of productivity with career age for most disciplines and a higher chance of outperforming in journal impact during early career stages.
Highlights
The development of knowledge-based economies and the increasing availability of information and knowledge itself have driven transdisciplinary efforts toward a better quantitative understanding of the scientific enterprise: the science of science [1,2]
We have opted to present the results for the journal impact factor (JIF) in the main text, and we refer to the Supplemental Material [45] for comparisons with the SCImago journal rank (SJR)
We have investigated the association between yearly scientific productivity and average journal impact for more than 6000 top Brazilian researchers
Summary
The development of knowledge-based economies and the increasing availability of information and knowledge itself have driven transdisciplinary efforts toward a better quantitative understanding of the scientific enterprise: the science of science [1,2]. Beyond the academic question of finding driving mechanisms of science, these initiatives aim to enhance scientific efficiency by identifying successful practices and policies, from the choice of countries’ scientific priorities to the selection of research projects and faculty candidates. Scientific progress is nowadays strongly dependent on research evaluation processes, as they regulate the stream of ideas and research projects by means of science funding allocation [2,3,4,5]. While peer review is considered the standard approach for assessing academic performance [6], the process itself is laborious and has several drawbacks, ranging from biases and lack of consistency to fraud [6,7,8,9]. A direct consequence of these issues is the steady increase (especially after the 2000s [12]) in the use of bibliometric indexes for grading the performance of researchers [5,13]
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