Success in Science: How Global Prestige Organizes Careers
For sociologists and science policy makers, this provides evidence that perceived academic success is globally oriented and tied to international journal hierarchies, revealing a selection effect in career progression.
This study analyzes survey and bibliometric data from 10,848 Polish scientists to show that academic success is multidimensional with a core centered on global publication prestige, where publishing in top international journals is the most central factor, while national journal publications are peripheral.
This article analyzes the structure of perceived academic success. We combine survey data from 10,848 Polish scientists with their Scopus bibliometric data at the individual level. We use polychoric correlations, exploratory factor analysis, network modeling (EBICglasso), and generalized linear mixed models in ordinal and binary forms. Our results show that academic success is multidimensional, with a clear core. This core is global publication prestige. Publishing in top international journals is the node with the highest centrality, and it is connected to other career dimensions, such as citations and international collaboration. Publications in top national journals, in contrast, are peripheral. The threshold structure of the scale indicates a selection effect. The definition of success is globally oriented and strongly tied to the hierarchy of international journals.