Publication rate expressed by age, gender and academic position – A large-scale analysis of Norwegian academic staff

This study investigates how scientific performance in terms of publication rate is influenced by the gender, age and academic position of the researchers. Previous studies have shown that these factors are important variables when analysing scientific productivity at the individual level. What is new with our approach is that we have been able to identify the relative importance of the different factors based on regression analyses (OLS) of each major academic field. The study, involving almost 12,400 Norwegian university researchers, shows that academic position is more important than age and gender. In the fields analysed, the regression model can explain 13.5–19 per cent of the variance in the publication output at the levels of individuals. This also means that most of the variance in publication rate is due to other factors.