Abstract
The prolific (exceptionally high producers of scholarly publications) are strategic to the study of academic science. The highly prolific have been drivers of research activity and impact and are a window into the stratification that exists. For these reasons, we address key characteristics associated with being highly prolific. Doing this, we take a social-organizational approach and use distinctive survey data on both social characteristics of scientists and features of their departments, reported by US faculty in computer science, engineering, and sciences within eight US research universities. The findings point to a telling constellation of hierarchical advantages: rank, collaborative span, and favorable work climate. Notably, once we take rank into account, gender is not associated with being prolific. These findings have implications for understandings of being prolific, systems of stratification, and practices and policies in higher education.
Highlights
The highly prolific are often considered standard-bearers of productivity
The data are collected in surveys1 of tenured and tenure-track faculty in departmental fields of computer science, engineering, and six fields of sciences
The findings depict the results of the sequence of the three logistic regression models with predictors of being prolific (Table 4)
Summary
The highly prolific are often considered standard-bearers of productivity. We use “highly prolific” to refer to a group (15.6%) who are in the right tail of the distribution of publication productivity (20 or more articles published/accepted in the prior 3 years). The rationale for this threshold, and the advantages of a 3-year period, appear in the “Method” section
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