The carbon footprint of scientific visibility

Abstract

In the face of global warming, academics have started to consider and analyze the environmental and carbon footprint associated with their professional activity. Among the several sources of greenhouse gas emissions from research activities, air travel—one of the most visible and unequal fractions of this footprint—has received much attention. Of particular interest is the question of how air travel may be related to scientific success or visibility as defined by current academic evaluation norms, notably bibliometric indicators. Existing studies, conducted over a small sample of individuals or within specific disciplines, have demonstrated that the number of citations may be related to air-travel frequency, but have failed to identify a link between air travel and publication rate or h-index. Here, using a comprehensive dataset aggregating the answers from over 6000 respondents to a survey sent to randomly selected scientists and staff across all research disciplines in France, we show that higher individual air travel is associated with a stronger publication rate and h-index. This relationship is robust to the inclusion of the effects of gender, career stage, and disciplines. Our analysis suggests that flying is a means for early-career scientists to obtain scientific visibility, and for senior scientists to maintain this visibility.