Association between productivity and journal impact across disciplines and career age

TL;DR

This large-scale study reveals that the relationship between scientific productivity and journal impact varies by discipline and career stage, with researchers typically not excelling simultaneously in both metrics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, discipline-specific analysis of how productivity and journal impact relate across career stages, highlighting patterns among outlier and non-outlier researchers.

Findings

Discipline-specific association between productivity and impact.

Outlier researchers rarely outperform in both metrics simultaneously.

Career patterns show increased productivity with age and higher impact early in careers.

Abstract

The association between productivity and impact of scientific production is a long-standing debate in science that remains controversial and poorly understood. Here we present a large-scale analysis of the association between yearly publication numbers and average journal-impact metrics for the Brazilian scientific elite. We find this association to be discipline-specific, career-age dependent, and similar among researchers with outlier and non-outlier performance. Outlier researchers either outperform in productivity or journal prestige, but they rarely do so in both categories. Non-outliers also follow this trend and display negative correlations between productivity and journal prestige but with discipline-dependent intensity. Our research indicates that academics are averse to simultaneous changes in their productivity and journal-prestige levels over consecutive career years. We also find that career patterns concerning productivity and journal prestige are discipline-specific, having in common a raise of productivity with career age for most disciplines and a higher chance of outperforming in journal impact during early career stages.