Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Broström, Anders

Titel

Academic breeding grounds: Home department conditions and early career performance of academic researchers

Ist Teil von

• Research policy, 2019-09, Vol.48 (7), p.1647-1665

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier B.V

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •Investigates how the “home” research group of PhD candidates shapes early career research performance.•Students who were trained in groups with a high proportion of PhD students have below-average research performance.•Students whose thesis research was subjected to significant funder influence have below-average research performance. This study investigates how research group characteristics relate to the early career success of PhD candidates who are trained in the group. In particular, I study how the citation impact of early-career PhDs is related to the staff composition and funding of the group. Using data on a cohort of Swedish doctoral graduates in science, engineering, mathematics and medicine, two sets of findings are obtained. First, students who were trained in groups with a lower number of PhD students perform better in terms of academic productivity. From the perspective of research policy, this finding suggests a decreasing return to funding additional PhD student positions allocated to professors who are already maintaining larger research groups. Second, PhD students trained in groups with funding for PhD research that is conditioned by funder influence over the topic of thesis research are more likely to stay in academia. Controlling for career destination, however, PhDs from such groups have lower than average scientific productivity and citation impact. These results suggest that funders of PhD studies face a trade-off between the two different funding objectives of “getting what they want” in terms of research content and fostering successful scholars.