IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v114y2018i3d10.1007_s11192-017-2580-y.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The relation between the quality of research, researchers’ experience, and their academic environment

Author

Listed:
  • Thor-Erik Sandberg Hanssen

    (Nord University)

  • Finn Jørgensen

    (Nord University)

  • Berner Larsen

    (Nord University)

Abstract

This article investigates to what extent researchers’ experience and the solidity of their academic environment influence the quality of their research. The hypotheses are derived from the assumptions that experience matters for quality research and that there are great intellectual synergies to be obtained from interacting with many colleagues who are active researchers. All articles published between 2000 and 2006 in five leading transportation journals are included in the analysis, and their research quality is measured by the number of times each article is cited by August 2016. Controlling for other factors influencing citations, such as article age and the number of references, the most important finding is that both experience and academic environment matter for performing quality research. When the authors’ experience, measured by the number of previous publications, increases by 1% from its average level, their published articles are expected to garner 0.31% more citations. Moreover, when the research activity at the unit to which the authors are affiliated, measured by the unit’s total number of publications, increases by 1% from its average level, the number of times their articles are cited will increase by 0.19%. This signals that, relatively speaking, the researchers’ own experience and merits mean more than the academic environment with regard to producing high-quality research. The above results enable us to discuss how researchers’ experience can compensate for working in less active academic communities holding research quality constant.

Suggested Citation

  • Thor-Erik Sandberg Hanssen & Finn Jørgensen & Berner Larsen, 2018. "The relation between the quality of research, researchers’ experience, and their academic environment," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(3), pages 933-950, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:114:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-017-2580-y
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-017-2580-y
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-017-2580-y
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-017-2580-y?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bertocchi, Graziella & Gambardella, Alfonso & Jappelli, Tullio & Nappi, Carmela A. & Peracchi, Franco, 2015. "Bibliometric evaluation vs. informed peer review: Evidence from Italy," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 44(2), pages 451-466.
    2. Ali Gazni & Fereshteh Didegah, 2011. "Investigating different types of research collaboration and citation impact: a case study of Harvard University’s publications," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 87(2), pages 251-265, May.
    3. Ebadi, Ashkan & Schiffauerova, Andrea, 2015. "How to become an important player in scientific collaboration networks?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(4), pages 809-825.
    4. Hamid R. Jamali & Mahsa Nikzad, 2011. "Article title type and its relation with the number of downloads and citations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 88(2), pages 653-661, August.
    5. Glenn D. Walters, 2006. "Predicting subsequent citations to articles published in twelve crime-psychology journals: Author impact versus journal impact," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 69(3), pages 499-510, December.
    6. Fereshteh Didegah & Mike Thelwall, 2013. "Determinants of research citation impact in nanoscience and nanotechnology," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(5), pages 1055-1064, May.
    7. Hanssen, Thor-Erik Sandberg & Jørgensen, Finn, 2015. "The value of experience in research," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 16-24.
    8. Moshe Yitzhaki, 2002. "Relation of the title length of a journal article to the length of the article," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 54(3), pages 435-447, July.
    9. Fereshteh Didegah & Mike Thelwall, 2013. "Determinants of research citation impact in nanoscience and nanotechnology," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(5), pages 1055-1064, May.
    10. Motty Perry & Philip J. Reny, 2016. "How to Count Citations If You Must," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(9), pages 2722-2741, September.
    11. David Hensher & William Greene, 2003. "The Mixed Logit model: The state of practice," Transportation, Springer, vol. 30(2), pages 133-176, May.
    12. Natsuo Onodera & Fuyuki Yoshikane, 2015. "Factors affecting citation rates of research articles," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(4), pages 739-764, April.
    13. Winston, Clifford, 1985. "Conceptual Development in the Economics of Transportation: An Interpretive Survey," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 23(1), pages 57-94, March.
    14. Vincent Larivière & Yves Gingras & Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Andrew Tsou, 2015. "Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(7), pages 1323-1332, July.
    15. Andrea Bonaccorsi & Cinzia Daraio, 2003. "Age effects in scientific productivity," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 58(1), pages 49-90, September.
    16. Donald deB. Beaver, 2004. "Does collaborative research have greater epistemic authority?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 60(3), pages 399-408, August.
    17. Abramo, Giovanni & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea, 2015. "The relationship between the number of authors of a publication, its citations and the impact factor of the publishing journal: Evidence from Italy," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(4), pages 746-761.
    18. Michael S. Patterson & Simon Harris, 2009. "The relationship between reviewers’ quality-scores and number of citations for papers published in the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology from 2003–2005," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 80(2), pages 343-349, August.
    19. R. Kenna & B. Berche, 2011. "Critical mass and the dependency of research quality on group size," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 86(2), pages 527-540, February.
    20. Vanclay, Jerome K., 2013. "Factors affecting citation rates in environmental science," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 265-271.
    21. Dag W Aksnes, 2003. "Characteristics of highly cited papers," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 12(3), pages 159-170, December.
    22. Arthur M. Diamond Jr., 1986. "What is a Citation Worth?," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 21(2), pages 200-215.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lucília Cardoso & Arthur Filipe Araújo & Luís Lima Santos & Roland Schegg & Zélia Breda & Carlos Costa, 2021. "Country Performance Analysis of Swiss Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality Management Research," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-24, February.
    2. Fahad Ghabban & Ali Selamat & Roliana Ibrahim & Ondrej Krejcar & Petra Maresova & Enrique Herrera-Viedma, 2019. "The Influence of Personal and Organizational Factors on Researchers’ Attitudes towards Sustainable Research Productivity in Saudi Universities," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(17), pages 1-28, September.
    3. Peter Sjögårde & Fereshteh Didegah, 2022. "The association between topic growth and citation impact of research publications," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(4), pages 1903-1921, April.
    4. Lucília Cardoso & Rui Silva & Giovana Goretti Feijó de Almeida & Luís Lima Santos, 2020. "A Bibliometric Model to Analyze Country Research Performance: SciVal Topic Prominence Approach in Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(23), pages 1-26, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hanssen, Thor-Erik Sandberg & Jørgensen, Finn, 2015. "The value of experience in research," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 16-24.
    2. Iman Tahamtan & Askar Safipour Afshar & Khadijeh Ahamdzadeh, 2016. "Factors affecting number of citations: a comprehensive review of the literature," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 107(3), pages 1195-1225, June.
    3. Mingyang Wang & Zhenyu Wang & Guangsheng Chen, 2019. "Which can better predict the future success of articles? Bibliometric indices or alternative metrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(3), pages 1575-1595, June.
    4. Martorell Cunil, Onofre & Otero González, Luis & Durán Santomil, Pablo & Mulet Forteza, Carlos, 2023. "How to accomplish a highly cited paper in the tourism, leisure and hospitality field," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    5. Kaile Gong & Juan Xie & Ying Cheng & Vincent Larivière & Cassidy R. Sugimoto, 2019. "The citation advantage of foreign language references for Chinese social science papers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(3), pages 1439-1460, September.
    6. Ruan, Xuanmin & Zhu, Yuanyang & Li, Jiang & Cheng, Ying, 2020. "Predicting the citation counts of individual papers via a BP neural network," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(3).
    7. Yifan Qian & Wenge Rong & Nan Jiang & Jie Tang & Zhang Xiong, 2017. "Citation regression analysis of computer science publications in different ranking categories and subfields," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 110(3), pages 1351-1374, March.
    8. Ajiferuke, Isola & Famoye, Felix, 2015. "Modelling count response variables in informetric studies: Comparison among count, linear, and lognormal regression models," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 499-513.
    9. Kong, Ling & Wang, Dongbo, 2020. "Comparison of citations and attention of cover and non-cover papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    10. Basma Albanna & Julia Handl & Richard Heeks, 2021. "Publication outperformance among global South researchers: An analysis of individual-level and publication-level predictors of positive deviance," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(10), pages 8375-8431, October.
    11. Lutz Bornmann & Adam Y. Ye & Fred Y. Ye, 2018. "Identifying “hot papers” and papers with “delayed recognition” in large-scale datasets by using dynamically normalized citation impact scores," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 116(2), pages 655-674, August.
    12. Maksym Polyakov & Serhiy Polyakov & Md Sayed Iftekhar, 2017. "Does academic collaboration equally benefit impact of research across topics? The case of agricultural, resource, environmental and ecological economics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(3), pages 1385-1405, December.
    13. Bornmann, Lutz, 2019. "Does the normalized citation impact of universities profit from certain properties of their published documents – such as the number of authors and the impact factor of the publishing journals? A mult," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 170-184.
    14. Andrea Fronzetti Colladon & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Peter A. Gloor, 2020. "Predicting the future success of scientific publications through social network and semantic analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(1), pages 357-377, July.
    15. Tahamtan, Iman & Bornmann, Lutz, 2018. "Core elements in the process of citing publications: Conceptual overview of the literature," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 203-216.
    16. Stegehuis, Clara & Litvak, Nelly & Waltman, Ludo, 2015. "Predicting the long-term citation impact of recent publications," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 642-657.
    17. Thelwall, Mike & Wilson, Paul, 2014. "Regression for citation data: An evaluation of different methods," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(4), pages 963-971.
    18. Dehdarirad, Tahereh & Nasini, Stefano, 2017. "Research impact in co-authorship networks: a two-mode analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 371-388.
    19. Fan, Lingxu & Guo, Lei & Wang, Xinhua & Xu, Liancheng & Liu, Fangai, 2022. "Does the author’s collaboration mode lead to papers’ different citation impacts? An empirical analysis based on propensity score matching," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(4).
    20. Liu, Qiuling & Guo, Lei & Sun, Yiping & Ren, Linlin & Wang, Xinhua & Han, Xiaohui, 2024. "Do scholars' collaborative tendencies impact the quality of their publications? A generalized propensity score matching analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:114:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-017-2580-y. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.