Effects of seniority, gender and geography on the bibliometric output and collaboration networks of European Research Council (ERC) grant recipients.

David G Pina,Lana Barać,Ana Marušić,Francisco Grimaldo,Ivan Buljan,Lutz Bornmann

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0212286

David G Pina, Lana Barać + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0212286

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Abstract

Assessing the success and performance of researchers is a difficult task, as their grant output is influenced by a series of factors, including seniority, gender and geographical location of their host institution. In order to assess the effects of these factors, we analysed the publication and citation outputs, using Scopus and Web of Science, and the collaboration networks of European Research Council (ERC) starting (junior) and advanced (senior) grantees. For this study, we used a cohort of 355 grantees from the Life Sciences domain of years 2007–09. While senior grantees had overall greater publication output, junior grantees had a significantly greater pre-post grant award increase in their overall number of publications and in those on which they had last authorship. The collaboration networks size and the number of sub-communities increased for all grantees, although more pronounced for juniors, as they departed from smaller and more compact pre-award co-authorship networks. Both junior and senior grantees increased the size of the community within which they were collaborating in the post-award period. Pre-post grant award performance of grantees was not related to gender, although male junior grantees had more publications than female grantees before and after the grant award. Junior grantees located in lower research-performing countries published less and had less diverse collaboration networks than their peers located in higher research-performing countries. Our study suggests that research environment has greater influence on post-grant award publications than gender especially for junior grantees. Also, collaboration networks may be a useful complement to publication and citation outputs for assessing post-grant research performance, especially for grantees who already have a high publication output and who get highly competitive grants such as those from ERC.

Highlights

Peer review remains the core paradigm in assessing different research activities despite contradictory evidence on whether it is the best way of selecting grant proposals and judging articles’ suitability for publication [1]
Core Collection (WoS) databases [18]. This cohort was composed of Starting Grants (StG), designed to support junior researchers at the stage at which they are starting or consolidating their own independent research team, and Advanced Grants (AdG), reserved for leading senior investigators, having a track-record of significant research achievements in the last 10 years
The median funding was 1.2 and 2.2 million € for StG and AdG, respectively

Summary

Introduction

Peer review remains the core paradigm in assessing different research activities despite contradictory evidence on whether it is the best way of selecting grant proposals and judging articles’ suitability for publication [1]. Female researchers obtain lower funding [11,12] and, even when receiving similar grant funding, female faculty may lag behind their male colleagues in terms of publications and citations [13]. Longitudinal studies have shown that gender bias exists over professional research careers, even after controlling for other factors, such as research field and performance differences [6]. Another important bias–geographical location of the researcher host institution–has been described as influencing the peer review process in scientific journals [14] and in research grants, even within a single country [15]

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