Individual publication productivity as a social position effect in academic and industrial research units

Throughout the development of the sociology of science, the study of normal scientific activity has focused on the general stratification and communication system in science. This seems to affect all scientific fields and manifests itself most clearly in the skewed distributions of productivity and rewards. There have been productivity studies on scientists of a variety of disciplines, including, among others, physiologists (Meltzer, 1956), psychologists (Clark, 1957), sociologists (Meltzer, 1949; Axelson, 1959; Babchuk and Bates, 1962; Clemente, 1974), medical researchers (Ben-David, I960), biologists and political scientists (Crane, 1965), psychometricians (Thomasson and Stanley, 1966), physicists (Cole and Cole, 1967, 1968; Gaston, 1969; Cole, 1970; Zuckerman and Merton, 1971) and chemists (Hagstrom, 1971; Blume and Sinclair, 1973a, b). Other studies, like that of Pelz and Andrews (1966), covered a wide variety of scientists from different specialities and disciplines.