The paper takes a scientometric approach to measure the change in research productivity of Italian academics before the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. We propose a composite output/input bibliometric indicator and apply it at the field level, conducting a longitudinal analysis. Although the number of academics in the national academic system has…

Disciplines display field-specific ways of valuing research contributions, and these different 'styles of valuation' influence how academic careers are assessed and formed. Yet, differences in how research is evaluated are also prevalent between different levels of assessment: collegial and organizational. Consequently, we employ a multifaceted…

Publish or Perish has a variety of meanings. Most often, the term is understood as a reference to the material requirements of publishing relentlessly in order to make or advance a career in contemporary academia. In this article, I show that Publish or Perish is also a cultural narrative that appears to provide a formal rationalistic solution to…

Over the past decade, academic social networking sites, such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, have become a common tool in academia for accessing publications and displaying metrics for research evaluation and self-monitoring. In this conceptual article, we discuss how these academic social networking sites, as devices of evaluation that build on…

Over the last decades, most EU countries have profoundly reshaped their public research funding systems by shifting from traditional institutional block-funding towards more project-based mechanisms. The main rationale underlying this evolution builds on the assumption that project funding would foster research performance through the introduction…

Academic publishing is undergoing profound changes that shape the conditions of knowledge production and the way research is communicated, prompting a lively debate on how the various activities of those involved can be adequately acknowledged in publications. This contribution aims to empirically examine the relationship between authorship…

Many studies concerning social capital in academia have used social network theory and social network analysis as an approach. Social network analysis focuses on a boundary set of actors in a network and what it reveals as an outcome of social capital. However, social capital is also a precursor or catalyst for cooperative work. Here, we…

Research evaluation (RE) has experienced a major global transformation prompted by the emergence and increasing usage of digital citation platforms such as the Web of Science and Scopus, opening up avenues for scientometric evaluation (SE). This relatively novel evaluation method represents an essential pillar for the scientific committees for…

This study critically examined the increasing threat of predatory publications in academia, revealing how researchers at Pakistan's Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) take advantage of this trend for academic gains. We examined the widespread trend of predatory publishing for Pakistani public and private HEIs, explicitly focusing on Physical…

Many governments attempt to improve national higher education through the competitive support of universities. These policy approaches raise questions about the impact on the entire system--both in research and educational--of targeted support for a small number of universities. Addressing challenges in the measurement of university excellence…

The extent to which predatory journals can harm scientific practice increases as the numbers of such journals expand, in so far as they undermine scientific integrity, quality, and credibility, especially if those journals leak into prestigious databases. Journal Citation Reports (JCRs), a reference for the assessment of researchers and for…

A researcher's number of publications has been a fundamental merit in the competition for academic positions since the late 18th century. Today, the simple counting of publications has been supplemented with a whole range of bibliometric indicators, which supposedly not only measures the volume of research but also its impact. In this study, we…

While it has been stressed repeatedly that academics nowadays have come to face extensive pressure, the extent and distribution of pressure to publish and to secure third-party funding has not been systematically investigated on a large scale. Based on the Zurich Survey of Academics, a representative large-scale web survey among academics working…

In the context of growing societal demand and interdependency, universities need to prioritize their "third mission" activities and balance them against core functions. Individual researchers too are faced with multiple external constituencies and various mechanisms for interaction. The degree, target, and mode of their involvement with…