Exploring the determinants of scientific productivity: a proposed typology of researchers
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-07-2019-0178 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Pages | 195-221 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Knowledge management,HR & organizational behaviour,Organizational structure/dynamics,Accounting & finance,Accounting/accountancy,Behavioural accounting |
| Author | José Luis Ballesteros-Rodríguez,Petra De Saá-Pérez,Natalia García-Carbonell,Fernando Martín-Alcázar,Gonzalo Sánchez-Gardey |
Exploring the determinants of
scientific productivity: a proposed
typology of researchers
Jos
e Luis Ballesteros-Rodr
ıguez and Petra De Sa
a-P
erez
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, and
Natalia Garc
ıa-Carbonell, Fernando Mart
ın-Alc
azar and
Gonzalo S
anchez-Gardey
Business Management Department, University of C
adiz, C
adiz, Spain
Abstract
Purpose –Although several previous studies were focused on examining the determinants of research
productivity, the knowledge of the competences and motives that lead researchers to achieve relevant
scientific performance remains unclear. This paper is aimed at contributing to this gap in the research
by proposing a typology to understand academic researchers’traits and extending the traditional
“more is better”approach, which assumes that higher levels of competence and motivation are always
preferable.
Design/methodology/approach –Cluster analysis was applied to a sample of 471 Spanish academics to
examine diverse combinations of human capital attributes –knowledge, skills, and abilities –and two sources
of motivation –intrinsic and extrinsic.
Findings –Four researcher profiles were identified: (1) high vocational academics; (2) motivated academics;
(3) self-starter academics and (4) reactive academics. Based on these preliminary findings, we present
conclusions about the functioning and productivity of academic researchers.
Originality/value –This paper contributes a novel typology of researchers to the extant literature based on
the variables of academic human capital and motivation. The findings indicate that a required and specific
combination of attributes better fits the reality of research activities.
Keywords Human capital, Motivation, Academic researchers, Typology, Scientific productivity
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Reduced government research funding, international and national research evaluations and
even pressure from current world university rankings have forced universities to improve
their performance indicators. Hence, more than ever before, the expression “publish or perish”
(Nygaard, 2017, p. 519) reflects the reality of many academic researchers. Higher-quality
research and increased quantities of publications are demanded, which requires the increased
activity of research groups and academics.
Several previous studies have focused on clarifying researchers’productivity, which
has been an ongoing debate in the current academic literature (Brew et al., 2016). Diverse
perspectives supported these studies, regarding factors such as the academic environment,
institutional support, reward systems, patterns of collaboration and, in particular,
individual researcher’s characteristics and motives. From a microperspective, the
analysis of individual traits –either single or a set –has mainly followed the traditional
Determinants
of scientific
productivity
195
The authors appear in alphabetical order and have contributed equally to this paper. The research
project described in this paper was developed under the Research Group SEJ-449 funded by the
Andalusian Government (Andalusian Plan for R&D&I 2007–2013) and the Research Projects ECO2014-
56580-R funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology (Non-oriented Fundamental
Research Projects Subprogram) and P12-SEJ-1810 (Andalusian Government).
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1469-1930.htm
Received 24 July 2019
Revised 22 December 2019
27 February 2020
24 April 2020
Accepted 7 May 2020
Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 23 No. 2, 2022
pp. 195-221
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-07-2019-0178
“more is better”approach, which assumes that higher levels of competences are always
better (Ployhart et al., 2014). Although it has been widely accepted, this approach fails to
offer conclusive explanations of the extent to which individual research attributes
determine scientific results. Previous findings showed that having many competences did
not always imply an increase in performance (Wright and McMahan, 2011). We question
whether the “more is better”approach really fits the academic reality and propose
a“profile”view to present a complementary combination of research attributes.
Additionally, in order to provide a complete profile of academics and preliminary
research results, we introduce the factor of academics’research motivation, assuming that
competences are a necessary but insufficient condition for performance (Harris and Kaine,
1994;Ryan, 2014).
Therefore, this paper fills an important gap in the literature by focusing on the individual
characteristics and motives required in research processes (Corley et al., 2019;Munshaw et al.,
2019). To address the gap, our proposal integrates two main bodies of literature in the
scientific productivity research: (1) intellectual capital arguments to use human capital as a
main dimension to explain differences in research productivity; (2) motivation theory to
introduce the traditional “intrinsic”and “extrinsic”dimensions of academics’motivation. In
doing so, this paper contributes to the current literature by proposing a preliminary academic
typology based on an integrated profile of individual characteristics and by extending the
analysis of academics’traits.
This paper is structured as follows: (1) we review the existing literature on human capital
and motivation in academia and how both attributes influence scientific productivity; (2) we
conduct an exploratory K-means cluster analysis to describe researcher typology in a sample
of 471 Spanish academics; (3) we discuss the findings and implications of the study and we
propose future directions of research.
Configuring academic profiles: an integrative view of human capital and
motivation
Academic human capital and scientific performance
Previous studies in the organizational literature recognized the importance of intellectual
capital in generating value (Dzenopoljac et al., 2017;Ferreira and Franco, 2017;Mehralian
et al., 2018). In the last decade, these arguments have also been applied to universities and
public and non-profit organizations (Sangiorgi and Siboni, 2017). Despite the importance of
every intellectual capital dimension –human, social and organizational –in explaining the
functioning of universities, human capital is considered a crucial intangible resource that
affects scientific productivity (Bozeman et al., 2001;Lin and Bozeman, 2006;Ponomariov and
Boardman, 2010;Karlsson and Wigren, 2012;Thienphut et al., 2015;Corley et al., 2019;
Munshaw et al., 2019).
In particular, the extant literature presents several different perspectives that explain the
link between human capital and performance in the academic context, which has led to a lack
of consensus about the specific traits that affect research results. Hence, in our literature
review, we organize this previous work into three main lines of research: (1) studies that
examine the effects of single and/or disconnected academic attributes, mainly demographic,
on research performance; (2) studies that focus on analyzing sets of unobservable individual
characteristics and (3) the stream of literature that is based on traditional human capital
theory (Becker, 1962). In the latter, academic attributes are described as “knowledge, skills
and other specific abilities”(KSA). Most works in this group used Bozeman et al.’s (2001)
“scientific and technical human capital (STHC)”model to expand the original notion of KSA.
Specifically, the STHC model is defined as “the sum of an individual researcher’s professional
network ties, technical knowledge and skills, and resources broadly defined”(Bozeman et al.,
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