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Are academics who publish more also more cited? Individual determinants of publication and citation records

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Abstract

Thanks to a unique individual dataset of French academics in economics, we explain individual publication and citation records by gender and age, co-authorship patterns (average number of authors per article and size of the co-author network) and specialisation choices (percentage of output in each JEL code). The analysis is performed on both EconLit publication scores (adjusted for journal quality) and Google Scholar citation indexes, which allows us to present a broad picture of knowledge diffusion in economics. Citations are largely driven by publication records, which means that these two measures are partly substitutes, but citations are also substantially increased by larger research team size and co-author networks.

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Notes

  1. Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche–Direction Générale de la Recherche et de l’Innovation.

  2. We matched data from the Universities, from the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and from the INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique).

  3. In logarithms to match the econometric analysis presented in “Econometric specification”.

  4. The academics who have never co-authored an article have a network of size 0, so we add 1 to Net i to take its log. 1 + Net i can be seen as the total network size, including academic i who would belong to her/his own network in this case.

  5. We ignore the fields “Miscellaneous Categories” (Y) and “Other Special Topics” (Z). We also slightly modify the codes C and D by merging code C7 (Game Theory and Bargaining Theory) and C9 (Design of Experiments) with Microeconomics (D), which seems to us more consistent.

  6. We estimate the γ j coefficients under the constraint ∑ 18 j = 1 γ j  = 0. Therefore significance tests reported for the γ j are with respect to the average γ j .

  7. 1.5−0.262 − 1,  1.50.200 − 1 and 1.50.773 − 1, respectively.

  8. 1.50.266 − 1,  1.51.671 − 1,  1.51.056 − 1 and 1.50.861 − 1, respectively.

  9. 1.250.132 − 1 and 1.250.644 − 1, respectively.

  10. 1.20.216 − 1 and 1.20.789 − 1, respectively.

  11. The number of observations in the regressions falls slightly because some academics have only published articles for which JEL codes are not recorded in EconLit.

  12. 1.250.907 − 1 and 1.250.503 − 1, respectively.

  13. 1.10.221 − 1 and 1.10.126 − 1, respectively.

  14. 1.50.229 − 1 and 1.50.460 − 1, respectively.

  15. 1.20.303 − 1 and 1.20.225 − 1, respectively.

  16. \(\frac{1.021}{1.756}=0.581, \,\frac{1.037}{1.756}=0.591, \,\frac{0.532}{0.988}=0.538, \,\frac{0.544}{0.988}=0.551\)

  17. \(\frac{0.514}{0.284} = 1.810, \,\frac{0.516}{0.283} = 1.823\)

  18. \(\frac{0.539}{0.256} = 2.105, \,\frac{0.537}{0.255} = 2.106\)

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Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to Philippe Donnay and Charles Laitong for their excellent research assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. London School of Economics and Political Science (SERC), Aix-Marseille University (Aix-Marseille School of Economics), Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK

    Clément Bosquet

  2. Aix-Marseille University (Aix-Marseille School of Economics), CNRS & EHESS, Center for Economic Policy Research, 2, Rue de la Charité, 13 002, Marseille, France

    Pierre-Philippe Combes

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  1. Clément Bosquet
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  2. Pierre-Philippe Combes
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Correspondence to Pierre-Philippe Combes.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14.

Table 9 Top 50 journals
Full size table
Table 10 Individual descriptive statistics
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Table 11 Determinants of publication scores and citation indexes: specialisation only
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Table 12 Determinants of publication scores and citation indexes: detailed effects
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Table 13 Citation indexes regressed on publication scores with detailed specialisation effects
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Table 14 Determinants of citation indexes controlled for publication scores with detailed specialisation effects
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Bosquet, C., Combes, PP. Are academics who publish more also more cited? Individual determinants of publication and citation records. Scientometrics 97, 831–857 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-0996-6

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Keywords

Mathematics Subject Classification

JEL Classification

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