A population model for the academic ecosystem

Abstract

In recent times, the academic ecosystem has seen a tremendous growth in number of authors and publications. While most temporal studies in this area focus on evolution of co-author and citation network structure, this systemic inflation has received very little attention. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a population model for academia, derived from publication records in the Computer Science domain. We use a generalized branching process as an overarching framework, which enables us to describe the evolution and composition of the research community in a systematic manner. Further, the observed patterns allow us to shed light on researchers' lifecycle encompassing arrival, academic life expectancy, activity, productivity and offspring distribution in the ecosystem. We believe such a study will help develop better bibliometric indices which account for the inflation, and also provide insights into sustainable and efficient resource management for academia.