nep-sog New Economics Papers
on Sociology of Economics
Issue of 2014‒02‒21
two papers chosen by
Jonas Holmström
Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration

  1. Fishing for Complementarities: Competitive Research Funding and Research Productivity. By Hottenrott, Hanna; Lawson, Cornelia
  2. Collaborating With People Like Me: Ethnic co-authorship within the US By Richard B. Freeman; Wei Huang

  1. By: Hottenrott, Hanna; Lawson, Cornelia (University of Turin)
    Abstract: This paper empirically investigates complementarities between different sources of research funding with regard to academic publishing. We find for a sample of UK engineering academics that competitive funding is associated with an increase in ex-post publications but that industry funding decreases the marginal utility of public funding by lowering the publication and citation rate increases associated with public grants. However, when holding all other explanatory variables at their mean, the negative effect of the interaction does not translate into an effective decrease in publication and citation numbers. The paper also shows that the positive effect of public funding is driven by UK research council and charity grants and that EU funding has no significant effect on publication outcomes.
    Date: 2013–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uto:labeco:201318&r=sog
  2. By: Richard B. Freeman; Wei Huang
    Abstract: This study examines the ethnic identify of the authors of over 1.5 million scientific papers written solely in the US from 1985 to 2008. In this period the proportion of US-based authors with English and European names fell while the proportion of US-based authors with names from China and other developing countries increased. The evidence shows that persons of similar ethnicity co- author together more frequently than can be explained by chance given their proportions in the population of authors. This homophily in research collaborations is associated with weaker scientific contributions. Researchers with weaker past publication records are more likely to write with members of ethnicity than other researchers. Papers with greater homophily tend to be published in lower impact journals and to receive fewer citations than others, even holding fixed the previous publishing performance of the authors. Going beyond ethnic homophily, we find that papers with more authors in more locations and with longer lists of references tend to be published in relatively high impact journals and to receive more citations than other papers. These findings and those on homophily suggest that diversity in inputs into papers leads to greater contributions to science, as measured by impact factors and citations.
    JEL: J01 J1 J15
    Date: 2014–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19905&r=sog

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