Page 5 - IDEA Studie 01 2020 Rekrutovani vyzkumniku

ODKUD SE REKRUTUJÍ VÝZKUMNÍCI NA UNIVERZITÁCH? 2020 Study 1/2020 Where do universities recruit researchers from? February 2020 Vít Macháček, Martin Srholec2 Summary • Where do university researchers come from? How many remain at the same institution where they began doing research? How many have come from elsewhere? Does the tendency to employ researchers originally from the same place markedly differ across universities from different countries? How does this tendency differ between disciplines and over time? • From the author affiliations in the Scopus citation database, we found how many researchers are currently based at the same university they were affiliated with at the beginning of their research careers. If their early articles were published under a different organization, we traced whether this was in the same country or abroad. • We do not directly measure ‘academic inbreeding’ in the sense of universities hiring their own graduates, because due to differences in publishing practices, a researcher’s early articles may not have been published under his or her alma mater. However, in many disciplines, particularly natural sciences, this is likely to be the case. • Our findings are presented for eleven large disciplines and our comparison covers eighteen major universities in fourteen countries, including the new EU member states of the Visegrad group: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. • Generalizations are difficult to make, as each discipline looks a bit different. Overall, however, the most inward-looking institutions in employing researchers prove to be the national flagship universities in the Visegrad countries. In contrast, hiring researchers originally from outside is most prevalent in the leading universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, such as Princeton and Oxford. 2 The authors would like to thank Štěpán Jurajda, Daniel Münich, Sergey Slobodyan, Šimon Stiburek and Aleš Vlk for their useful comments on the draft version of the text. Any inaccuracies or errors and opinions are however down to the authors. The study received support from the research programme Strategy AV21 of the Czech Academy of Sciences. 3