Modelling Academics as Agents: An Implementation of an Agent-Based Strategic Publication Model

The rapid changes occurring in the higher education domain are placing increasing pressure on the actors in this space to focus efforts on identifying and adopting strategies for success. One particular group of interest are academics or scientists, and the ways that these individuals, or collectives as institutional or discipline-based science systems, make decisions about how best to achieve success in their chosen field. The agent-based model and simulation that we present draws on the hypothetical “strategic publication model†proposed by Mölders, Fink and Weyer (2011), and extends this work by defining experimental settings to implement a prototype ABMS in NetLogo. While considerable work remains to fully resolve theoretical issues relating to the scope, calibration and validation of the model, this work goes some way toward resolving some of the details associated with defining appropriate experimental settings. Also presented are the results of four experiments that focus on exploring the emergent effects of the system that result from varying the strategic mix of actors in the system.