The Economics of University Lab Science and the Role of Foreign Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars
29 Pages Posted: 8 Jan 2009
Date Written: August 2008
Abstract
We document the role that students and postdoctoral scholars (postdocs) play in university research by analyzing authorship patterns for a six month period for articles published in Science having a last author affiliated with a U.S. university. The paper sample is composed of 133 papers with fewer than ten authors, for which we determine the status of all authors residing in the U.S., and for 159 papers regardless of the number of authors, for which we determine the status of first and last author. We find that 86.5% of papers-nearly seven out of eight (133 paper sample) - have either a current postdoc or a student as one of the authors. We find that 103 of the 138 first authors who are in the U.S. and whose position is known are either a postdoc or a student (74.6%).
We identify the ethnicity of authors, drawing on the ethnic-name database created by William Kerr (2008). We find that 59.1% of postdoc authors are neither English nor European and that 39.6% of the graduate student coauthors have neither English nor European names. At the paper level, we infer that 70 of the 133 papers (53%) have a foreign student or postdoc as a coauthor. We infer that almost 60% of the graduate student first authors are foreign and that non-citizens make up slightly more than 54% of the postdocs who are first authors. We conclude that international graduate students and postdocs are not only important in staffing university labs; they play lead roles in university research.
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