Influence of Age, Gender and Academic position in Scientific Productivity: A Large-Scale Analysis of Sri Lankan University Academics.

Abstract

It is well known that there are large differences in the scientific production between academics. Relatively small proportion of academics or scientists contributes to the majority of the publications. There are factors influencing in scientific performance of researcher. Objective of this study is to investigatepublication rate of Sri Lankan academics in the university system by the gender, age and position. These factors are important variables when analyzing scientific productivity at the individual level. In the analysis, all academics were assigned to five major fields. The study was considered 4,300 academics in 14,550observations (i.e. publication numbers per years). Thus, there are on average almost three observations per person analyzed.Non-publishing personnel have not been included in the study as only people who have published article online or available in Google Scholar. This may be regarded as a limitation of this study as the inclusion of the non-publishing researchers could possiblyincrease the publication rate differences between genders, age groups and positions.Publication output has been measured as article equivalents per person per year. In this calculation, co-authored publications are fractionalized among the authors. Study identifies the relative importance of the different factors based on regression analyses (OLS) of each major academic field. Finding shows that academic position is more important than age and gender. In the fields analyzed, the regression model can explain 13.5–19 per cent of the variance in the publication output at the levels of individuals. This also means that most of the variance in publication rate is due to other factors.