Top performers and top journals: Persistent concentration in scientific publishing

TL;DR

This study reveals that access to prestigious top-tier journals is strongly concentrated among top-performing scientists across disciplines, acting as a durable gatekeeping mechanism that sustains scientific elites over time.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence of persistent concentration of top scientists publishing in elite journals, highlighting the role of journal hierarchy in academic stratification.

Findings

Top performers dominate top-tier journals across all disciplines.

Publishing in prestigious journals correlates with higher elite status.

Access to top journals is a key factor in scientific career advancement.

Abstract

In this research, we analyze the relationship between publishing productivity and access to highly prestigious journals, treating publishing in top journals as a stratification mechanism selecting publishing elites. We study N = 144,314 Polish scientists publishing for 30 years (1992-2021) and their Nart = 433,546 unique research articles published in the period. Using bibliometric data from Scopus, we compare the scientists belonging to the top productivity decile (the upper 10%, termed top performers) and the remaining population of scientists (90%) by discipline and period (five six-year periods). We measure the share of publications in prestigious segments of journals, with particular reference to the 90th-99th percentiles, and we use nonlinear journal prestige-normalized productivity. Our results indicate that access to top journals (defined as the top 10% of journals indexed in Scopus) is powerfully and permanently concentrated in the group of top performers in all disciplines and periods studied. The differences between top performers and the other scientists are primarily of a qualitative nature: they are seen almost exclusively at the top of the journal hierarchy rather than in its bottom or middle segments. Our logistic regression models indicate the complementarity of quantity and quality: publishing intensity increases the probability of membership in the elite segment of top performers, especially when it is coupled with publishing in prestigious journals. Our results suggest that top journals function as selection gates to academic careers and that they function as durable mechanisms of elite reproduction in science.