Academics’ susceptibility to disruptions of their research productivity: empirical insights from the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract The circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted research activities, but did not affect all academics equally. Understanding which academics were susceptible to disruptions is essential for gauging and addressing the pandemic’s systemic consequences and can yield insights into influences on research productivity more generally. Based on the survey responses of 1891 university professors in Germany, we estimate multivariate models to investigate the relevance of a comprehensive set of factors that may have shaped the pandemic’s impact. We furthermore use sample splits and an econometric decomposition technique to analyze disciplinary and gender differences. Our findings show that some factors, including additional time demands for care responsibilities and negative spillovers from disruptions of teaching activities, are of general relevance, whereas the relevance of other factors varies between groups of academics. In the natural and engineering sciences, the dependence on access to research facilities seems to have led to a more uniform negative impact of the pandemic. This apparently rendered the work environment an important influence on academics’ susceptibility to disruptions. In the humanities and social sciences, where the pandemic’s impact was more heterogeneous, individual conditions such as seniority played a notable role. Most of these factors identified as relevant were furthermore more influential among female academics, who seem to experience greater challenges with shielding their research activities from disruptions. Overall, our investigation highlights the complexity of mechanisms worth taking into account for policy and management efforts concerned with academics’ research productivity, within and outside of the context of the pandemic.