A flexible approach for measuring author-level publishing performance

Sustainable agrifood supply chains: Bibliometric, network and content analyses

Nowadays the agrifood system requires major transformations aimed at promoting sustainability, reducing waste and stimulating a change toward healthy sustainable diets. The scientific literature on the transition to sustainable food models continues to develop rapidly and there is an urgent need to systematize its knowledge structure and thus make future research more vigorous. Recently, several studies have focused on certain aspects of supply chain, such as traceability or decision-making frameworks, but a systematic review of the role of sustainability within the agrifood supply has never been carried out. Through a bibliometric analysis combined with network and content analyses, the present study is aimed at identifying homogeneous areas in the field of agrifood supply chains, investigating the role of innovation technology in the transition to sustainability. The bibliometric results showed that sustainable agrifood supply chains are experiencing an evolving positive trend and represent a challenging research topic which is capturing the attention of scholars. From the network and overlay visualization of keyword co-occurrences four different research clusters were identified and the blockchain emerged as central topic in the field of food security and safety. The content analysis highlighted greater attention to the environmental pillar, compared to the economic and social pillars of the sustainability paradigm. A lack of studies was also observed on the post-consumption phase of the agrifood supply chain, which could represent a research gap to be fulfilled in the light of circular economy.

Academic vs. biological age in research on academic careers: a large-scale study with implications for scientifically developing systems

Biological age is an important sociodemographic factor in studies on academic careers (research productivity, scholarly impact, and collaboration patterns). It is assumed that the academic age, or the time elapsed from the first publication, is a good proxy for biological age. In this study, we analyze the limitations of the proxy in academic career studies, using as an example the entire population of Polish academic scientists and scholars visible in the last decade in global science and holding at least a PhD (N = 20,569). The proxy works well for science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) disciplines; however, for non-STEMM disciplines (particularly for humanities and social sciences), it has a dramatically worse performance. This negative conclusion is particularly important for systems that have only recently visible in global academic journals. The micro-level data suggest a delayed participation of social scientists and humanists in global science networks, with practical implications for predicting biological age from academic age. We calculate correlation coefficients, present contingency analysis of academic career stages with academic positions and age groups, and create a linear multivariate regression model. Our research suggests that in scientifically developing countries, academic age as a proxy for biological age should be used more cautiously than in advanced countries: ideally, it should be used only for STEMM disciplines.