Productivity in academia: When the rules determine the losers

Abstract

Academic productivity is often defined as the number of published scientific articles, citations, and grants a scientist achieves (Sarli and Carpenter, 2014).It is considered an objective metric of a researcher's impact or ability in their field (Sarli and Carpenter, 2014) and is used to rank competitors for research funding, job openings, and other competitions (Bol et al., 2018).However, systematic biases against traditionally marginalized groups (women, people with disabilities, BIPOC-black, indigenous, and people of color, people from the Global South, and 2SLGBTQIA+-two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersexual, asexual, and others), can impact their productivity, making the currently used academic productivity metric a biased index of scientific merit, besides also impacting the way that this productivity is evaluated.Such systematic biases are demonstrated by empirical evidence, which we discuss below.

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