Which Scientific Elite? On the Concentration of Funding, Productivity and Citations

This content is not available in the selected language.

Using a very large population of university professors and researchers (N=13,479), this paper analyses the concentration of funding, papers and citations at the level of individual researchers. It shows that each of these distributions is different: citations being the most concentrated, followed by funding, papers published and finally number of funded projects. Concentration measures also vary between fields, social sciences and humanities being generally the most concentrated. The paper also shows that the correspondence between the elites defined by each of these measures is limited. In fact, only 3.2% of the researchers are in the top 10% on all indicators, while about 20% are in the top 10% in at least one of the indicators. The paper concludes with a discussion on the causes of these observed differences and formulates a few hypotheses.

This content has been updated on June 2nd, 2017 at 14 h 28 min.