It has been a busy year for the Academic Analytics Research Center. We’ve conducted webinar presentations and published the results of a handful of research projects, and we’ve also provided public access to the data resources underlying a position paper on the rhythms of scholarly publication. As we head into the fall season, we’re looking back at what we’ve learned as we examined the national research environment so far this year.
Please join us on April 13, 2021 at 1:00pm EDT to discuss our new research on the publication patterns of senior scholars relative to their colleagues. We explored journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and chapters in edited volumes across academic age cohorts - the work has been peer reviewed and is in press, join us for a preview of the results!
AARC researchers are delighted to see our recent article “Who’s writing open access (OA) articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States” discussed by the scholarly community, and we hope our findings contribute to the greater open access project and its goal to democratize the research literature. Here’s a link to the article. Recently, for instance, journalist Benjamin Plackett published an article in Nature Index discussing inequity in open access publishing (click here to read the […]
Last week, AARC researchers Dr. Molly J. Wilson and Dr. Anthony J. Olejniczak discussed their recent paper Who’s writing Open Access (OA) articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D. granting institutions in the USA with a live audience via webinar. The discussion was excellent, and the playback is available here: link to request playback.
Academic Analytics matches a huge number of honorific awards (10,000+) to individual scholars in the American academy. AARC researchers recently began digging through this data trove, and some summary statistics by discipline offer a glimpse into the deeper patterns we’re investigating. We started with academic department faculty lists for the 2019/2020 academic year. We then matched national or international awards (no state or local awards) bestowed upon those academics between 2017 and 2019, and created a table showing the number […]
Preprints have been around for a few decades, but posting preprints to a repository has only become the new normal for scholars in recent years. Preprints allow researchers to stake a claim to their ideas and results by establishing a clear and timestamped record of their work, even if the peer review process drags on for months. Preprints also facilitate rapid communication among scholars, which can be critical during times of crisis; the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, led to a […]
AARC scholars work with many datasets describing the publication outputs of research faculty. These datasets are almost always zero-inflated, or at least are skewed toward the lower end of the distribution. This phenomenon is so common we’ve even changed how we perform regression analyses to account for these skewed distributions (e.g., we ran hurdle regressions in our paper on Open Access publication trends). The histogram below shows the average number of journal articles published by scholars in departments classified as […]
Scholars at AARC are working hard on a project aimed at quantifying the dizzying growth of Ph.D. education in the US over the past 25 years (more on that project in a few months). As we looked at the number of Ph.D. graduates and the number of programs over time, we realized that growth in those areas probably means growth in another metric- the number of faculty members mentoring those students and teaching in those programs. The table below shows […]
AARC scholars have a manuscript in review about the graying of the American professoriate (see the preprint here: 10.31235/osf.io/vznty). As we explored the publication patterns of early career, middle career, and senior scholars, a basic question emerged that we didn’t include in our original study: are some academic fields home to “older” faculty than others, on average? The table below shows the 10 “oldest” fields in the Academic Analytics database (version AAD2019-1470); we infer age from the year each scholar […]
On January 1, Science published a news story by Jeffrey Brainard about Plan S and Open Access publishing (the story is available here). Brainard’s story describes Plan S (a mainly European initiative mandating free and immediate access to articles published by authors supported by public grants) and provides a primer on the state of Open Access publishing, how it benefits authors, and some of the criticisms of the OA financial model. Academic Analytics and the Academic Analytics Research Center (AARC) […]
