In this work we examine the relationship between research performance, age, and seniority in academic rank of full professors in the Italian academic system. Differently from a large part of the previous literature, our results generally show a negative monotonic relationship between age and research performance, in all the disciplines under analysis. We also highlight a positive relationship between seniority in rank and performance, occurring particularly in certain disciplines. While in Medicine, Biology and Chemistry this result could be explained by the "accumulative advantage" effect, in other disciplines, like Civil engineering and Pedagogy and Psychology, it could be due to the existence of a large performance differential between young and mature researchers, at the moment of the promotion to full professors. These results, witnessed both generally and at the level of the individual disciplines, offer useful insights for policy makers and academia administrators on the role of older professors.
In recent decades many of the Western nations' university systems have experienced periods of contraction in faculty recruitment, with the resulting progressive aging of their research personnel (Kyvik and Olsen, 2008;Kyvik, 1990;Bayer and Dutton, 1977). This has stimulated increased interest in investigation of the effects of the advancing age of researchers on their performance (Bonaccorsi and Daraio, 2003;Levin and Stephan, 1989;Cole, 1979). One might expect that the researchers' level of experience could increase with age (Gingras et al., 2008), but in contrast aging could also weigh negatively on the individuals' cognitive capacities (Giambra et al., 1995) and increase the risks for the obsolescence of their knowledge and the loss of interest in research activity (Stephan and Levin, 1992;Price et al., 1975). The empirical studies of the age/performance relationship thus far reported have often furnished contrasting results, which hampers the development of unequivocal indications for policy (Stroebe, 2010).
In this work we analyze the combined effects of age and seniority in rank on the research performance of full professors in Italy, whereby universities are mostly public, competition is scarce and incentive systems insufficient to foster continuous improvements. Our field of observation concerns professors carrying out research in fields where bibliometric techniques can be applied to the measurement of research performance. The dataset, notably broader than previous studies of this kind, consists of 11,989 Italian full professors, who represent 93.6% of the relevant population. The dates of birth of assistant and associate professors were not available to us. Indeed, by focusing on full professors we are able to partly control for the influence of academic rank on level of scientific performance, given that increasing rank corresponds with a general increase in the assets available for research activity, in the form of physical, financial, human or relational resources (Mishra and Smyth, 2013;Abramo et al., 2011;Bozeman and Gaughan, 2011). In addition, concentrating on full professors permits control for the impact of motivational factors exogenous to aging, such as the ambition to attain higher academic rank, which can induce greater productivity (Tien and Blackburn, 1996). The analysis of Italian universities also permits control for economic motivations, since national legislation imposes that all salaries are set according to the same scale of academic rank and seniority, thus making the professors’ income completely independent of their individual scientific performance.
Another specificity of the current work is the use, for the measure of research performance, of a sophisticated indicator of research productivity, embedding quantity, impact and relative contribution to output. However the analyses are also conducted for three other indicators previously applied in the literature: one concerning only quantity (total number of the researcher’s publications) and two for impact alone the prestige of the publishing journal as measured by impact factor (IF), and the articles’ impact measured by the number of citations received. We adopt a measurement method based on comparative evaluation of performance by academics in the same field and in the same academic rank, starting from publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). Each professor is first classified in his or her respective field of research, then the performance is compared with that of the other full professors in the same field, in order to avoid distortions due to the different intensity of publications across fields (Abramo et al., 2008;Butler, 2007;Garfield, 1979). The resort to this classification reduces the direct comparability of our results with those of the preceding literature, but certainly renders them more precise. At the same time, it permits recognition of potential differences across the 11 disciplines of analysis. In fact the relation between age and performance can vary across disciplines, given the different patterns of publication (Bayer and Dutton, 1977;Pfeffer et al., 1976) and the different rates of knowledge obsolescence (Levin and Stephan, 1989;van Heeringen and Dijkwel, 1987). Finally, the different disciplines could register different relations between age and performance due to the effects foreseen under the “accumulative advantage hypothesis” (Allison and Stewart, 1974;Cole and Cole, 1973). According to the hypothesis, the prestige acquired with early career progression should induce the maintenance or increase of the individuals’ performance in subsequent years, in part due to the resources obtained through their enhanced reputation (Kyvik, 1990;Cole, 1979). The effects foreseen due to “accumulative advantage” can be different in the diverse disciplines due to the specific manner in which the prestige of researchers is evaluated (Allison and Stewart, 1974), as can likewise vary the capacities to acc
This content is AI-processed based on open access ArXiv data.
