Academic inbreeding and productivity of STEM early career researchers in different environments

Abstract

Academic inbreeding at the individual level is a characteristic of a scholar's career, when they work in the same organisations where they studied. The phenomenon is usually associated with reduced quality of human capital, low circulation of knowledge and ineffective human capital allocation. However, there are a number of countries where academic inbreeding is widespread, but how it affects the research productivity of early career researchers has not been sufficiently explored. This article aims to specify the correlation between academic inbreeding and the individual productivity of early-career researchers within the system characterised by the high level of inbreeding. The study uses environments with different infrastructural and organisational conditions as moderators to clarify the peculiarities of the relationship. Based on data about 1132 early-career researchers in four fields of study it was found that the publication activity of inbred-researchers does not differ from that of their mobile counterparts at prestigious organisations or in regions having middle and small number of academic organisations. However, academic inbreeding negatively correlates with research productivity at universities without special status and in metropolitan regions. Thus, when the organisational environment provides a high quality of human capital for its graduates, the effect of academic inbreeding is mitigated. The same effect of inbreeding is observed in environments with poor choice of employers.