Dept. of Anthropology, University of Akron, Akron, OH, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2022 Jan 31;17(1):e0259038. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259038. eCollection 2022.
If faculty placement in the American academic hierarchy is by merit, then it correlates with scholarly productivity at all career stages. Recently developed data-collection methods and bibliometric measures test this proposition in a cross-sectional sample of US academic archaeologists. Precocity-productivity near the point of initial hire-fails to distinguish faculty in MA- and PhD-granting programs or among ranked subsets of PhD programs. Over longer careers, on average archaeologists in PhD-granting programs outperform colleagues in lower programs, as do those in higher-ranked compared to lower-ranked PhD programs, all in the practical absence of mobility via recruitment to higher placement. Yet differences by program level lie mostly in the tails of productivity distributions; overlap between program levels is high, and many in lower-degree programs outperform many PhD-program faculty even when controlling for career length. Results implicate cumulative advantage to explain the pattern and suggest particularism as its cause.
如果美国学术等级制度中的教职人员是根据才能来安排的，那么这与各个职业阶段的学术生产力相关。最近开发的数据收集方法和文献计量措施在对美国学术考古学家的横断面样本中检验了这一假设。在初始雇佣点附近的早熟生产力未能区分硕士和博士学位授予项目中的教职人员，也未能区分博士学位项目中排名较高和较低的子集。在较长的职业生涯中，平均而言，在博士学位授予项目中的考古学家比在较低学位项目中的同事表现更好，在排名较高的博士学位项目中的考古学家比排名较低的博士学位项目中的同事表现更好，所有这些都是在通过招聘到更高职位的情况下实际上没有流动性的情况下实现的。然而，项目级别之间的差异主要在于生产力分布的尾部；项目级别之间的重叠度很高，即使在控制了职业长度的情况下，许多较低学位项目的人员也比许多博士项目的教职人员表现更好。结果表明，累积优势可以解释这种模式，并暗示其原因是特殊主义。
