Since the twenty-first century, universities in many countries, including China, have introduced tenure-track employment to attract outstanding faculty. Through a survey of 1099 faculty members from ...21 high-level research universities in China, this study used a quasi-experimental method to examine the effect of the tenure track on faculty members' academic performance. The results suggest that the implementation of the tenure track led to an increase in the number of academic publications, but a decrease in the number of high-quality academic articles. The study further analyzed the underlying mechanisms by which the tenure track affected faculty members' academic performance, and found that introducing the tenure track increased cross-institutional collaboration, thereby promoting academic productivity. However, it resulted in a reduction in research collaboration within the institution, which hindered academic publication in high-impact journals. In terms of disciplinary heterogeneity, this study shows that the negative effect of the tenure track on publication quality was more significant in science than in engineering. Based on the research results above, this paper proposed several suggestions for improving the tenure system to ensure research excellence.
This paper addresses the perceptions and mechanisms of doctoral student job decisions regarding the pursuit of careers in the government sector in China. Through the lens of social cognitive career ...theory (SCCT), we analysed 30 semi‐structured interviews that had been conducted with doctoral students from two prestigious Chinese universities who wish to work as civil servants. This study describes doctoral students' understanding of careers in government employment from the perspectives of work content, promotion channels and professional norms. The mechanisms influencing student career choices include personal goals, self‐efficacy, outcome expectations and environment. The clear goal of political ambition and work–life balance directly drives doctoral students to choose government institutions for employment. The diploma signal of doctoral degree itself and academic training give doctoral students a high sense of self‐efficacy, which is necessary for their choice of employment in the government. Occupational safety, occupational benefits and occupational value constitute the expectations of positive outcomes providing doctoral students with good feedback. In the current environment, the labour market situation and the impetus of universities combine to form a push force and the preferential recruitment policies of the state form a pull force, which jointly promote doctoral students to make decisions to work in government sector. In this paper, the fact that the Chinese government introduced the ‘special selected graduates’ scheme for doctoral students from prestigious universities in hope of recruiting intellectual elites to improve the quality of civil servants and the modernization level of social governance. Universities encourage PhD graduates to enter the government, hoping that this would enhance their social influence and reputation, thereby safeguarding their status as prestigious universities. From an institutional perspective, the process of doctoral students becoming civil servants can be said to be a form of cooperation between the government and universities.
University-based teacher educators are key agents of educational and societal change. Yet their academic careers across institutions and countries have received insufficient attention. To bridge this ...gap, our empirical study collected data from 12 teacher educators in different Chilean and Finnish research-oriented universities. Drawing from Archer's social theory, we examine teacher educators' reflexivity as a decision-making process, offering them directional guidance to act in and over their (professional) lives. We identify three agentic approaches to career path development triggered by reflexivity modes - we-relationship, excellence-driven and value-oriented - that Chilean and Finnish teacher educators practice amidst workplace structural and cultural conditions. These approaches explain their diverse professional trajectories, even under similar circumstances, and contradict ideas of linear progression and 'one-size-fits-all' solutions to career development. This study contributes to promoting more equitable career pathways for teacher educators in Chile, Finland and elsewhere.
The principal distinction drawn in this study is between research “internationalists” and “locals.” The former are scientists involved in international research collaboration while the latter group ...are not. These two distinct types of scientist compete for academic prestige, research funding, and international recognition. International research collaboration proves to be a powerful stratifying force. As a clearly defined subgroup, internationalists are a different academic species, accounting for 51.4% of Polish scientists; predominantly male and older, they have longer academic experience and higher academic degrees and occupy higher academic positions. Across all academic clusters, internationalists consistently produce more than 90% of internationally co-authored publications, representing 2320% of locals’ productivity for peer-reviewed articles and 1600% for peer-reviewed article equivalents. Internationalists tend to spend less time than locals on teaching-related activities, more time on research, and more time on administrative duties. Based on a large-scale academic survey (
N
= 3704), some new predictors of international research collaboration were identified by multivariate analyses. The findings have global policy implications for resource-poor science systems “playing catch-up” in terms of academic careers, productivity patterns, and research internationalization policies.
Publication pressure is perceived to be filtering down into doctoral education worldwide. We explore the causes and effects of the perceived centrality of publishing among doctoral students, ...emphasising the impact of publication pressure on students' identity trajectories. We draw on a qualitative analysis of 90 mainland Chinese doctoral students at universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau. We find that the credentialisation of publications in the increasingly competitive and publication-dominant academic labour market results in publishing-centred doctoral journeys. Our key finding is that the centrality of publishing affects every aspect of identity trajectory development: it causes doctoral students to commodify knowledge production, devalues coursework, conference participation, and teaching assistantships, encourages students to regard their supervisors as publishing facilitators and their peers as rivals rather than collaborators, and marginalises engagement with external stakeholders. In discussing these dimensions, we emphasise the need for a more comprehensive evaluation of candidates' abilities and honours in academic recruitment and call for policies to curtail the overemphasis on research output in academic evaluations.
Dr. Thomas K. Ricento is a professor emeritus of education at the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary in Canada. In 1987, he received his PhD degree in applied linguistics from ...the University of California, Los Angeles. Around his research interest in language policies in the context of minority languages in North America, he has conducted numerous international projects. He is the editor of the foundational reference work An introduction to language policy: Theory and method. Also, he is the author of the recent book Refugees in Canada: On the loss of social and cultural capital and has numerous books published in international venues. He has co-edited special issues in well-established journals such as TESOL Quarterly and Language Policy. Furthermore, his articles appeared in venues such as Journal of Sociolinguistics, Discourse & Society, and Journal of Language, Identity & Education. On 17 April 2023, Dr. Huseyin Uysal conducted this interview with Dr. Ricento virtually. Later, he transcribed the recorded audio and edited the text to maximize the readability.
Aims and objectives
To map and summarise published studies on the career opportunities and roles of doctoral‐educated (PhD and DNP) nurses in the clinical setting; to collate actions as proposed in ...the literature to promote career opportunities and roles for PhD and DNP nurses in the clinical setting.
Background
To improve healthcare outcomes and strengthen leadership in nursing practice, there is the need to place nurses with a doctorate in clinical settings. However, available evidence has never been summarised to map the state of the science in this field.
Design
A scoping review, in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta‐Analysis extension for scoping reviews statement (PRISMA‐ScR).
Methods
An electronic database of literature was searched by accessing CINAHL Complete and Medline (on EBSCO Host) and SCOPUS to identify studies published between January 2009–December 2019. A thematic analysis was performed by identifying emerging patterns in the research questions.
Results
Ten studies were found with three types of clinical engagement: (a) a practice influencer/developer; (b) a clinical leader; and (c) a clinical teacher for students. Working in clinical areas, doctoral‐educated nurses might influence several outcomes at the patient, research, staff and organisational levels.
Conclusions
Clinical roles for doctoral‐educated nurses are still uncommon. However, in the last ten years, a debate has started to identify the possible careers in clinical settings, the needs and the challenges encountered while developing clinical academic roles, as well as the outcomes and actions that should be undertaken.
Relevance to clinical practice
Academic nursing bodies, working with professional bodies and healthcare institutions at different levels, are called on to develop career frameworks, allowing the opportunity for doctoral‐educated nurses to be involved in clinical practice and to influence its quality and performance; this might in turn lead to an increase in the quality of research.
Researchers often receive contrasting incentives when conducting their work. On the one hand, an interdisciplinary approach is required to produce scientific advances and access to funding. On the ...other, academic scholarships and evaluation mechanisms are still organized following the criteria of traditional disciplinary fields. If pursuing interdisciplinary research results in contrasting outcomes, science may face an interdisciplinarity dilemma: should researchers pursue their own private interest to build a reputation? Or should they endeavor towards public interest? How costly in terms of reputation is to choose interdisciplinarity research (IDR) over (more) specialized research? We answer these questions by exploiting data on 23,926 articles published by 6,105 researchers affiliated with the University of Florida in the period 2008–2013. Through individual fixed-effect, we compare articles of the same scholar to roll out the influence of individual characteristics on the scientific impact of their research. We find that the diverse dimensions of IDR (Variety, Balance, and Disparity) have a different effect on the reputation of a scholar and on her contribution to societal research. We confirm the existence of trade-off between private and public interest. We also point out that the increase of IDR aiming at connecting distant disciplines reduces the usefulness of the resulting knowledge. Results are robust to various specifications and apply to all scholars, regardless of their gender, collaboration behavior, discipline, and performance. These findings pose challenging questions to policymakers.
•Funding agencies often reward researchers with an impact across different fields.•Evaluation mechanisms might penalize scholars that undertake societal research.•Researchers face a trade-off between reputation and societal research.•Interdisciplinarity is found to affect both citations and generality of knowledge.
Leading academics in business-to-business marketing were asked to reflect on their careers and to provide advice for doctoral students and early-career academics. Contributors responded to four ...broad, open-ended questions on this subject: what worked for them in their careers, what did not work, what were the dilemmas they encountered, and what overall advice would they give to junior researchers starting their academic career. This editorial distills the comments and reflections of the contributors into a collective wisdom, organized around the four interview questions, which combine to form a rich set of guidelines for early-career academics.
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