The moderating role of personal characteristics of authors in the publications’ quality for quantity trade-off

The rise of quantitative research evaluations has led researchers to adopt publication strategies that enable the pursuit of entry and career progression within institutions. Depending on the performance evaluation criteria adopted, researchers emphasize more on publication quantity, impact, prestige of hosting journals, or seek a combination. What we investigate in this paper is the nature of the impact for quantity trade-off with, in particular, control for the moderating role of the personal characteristics of authors. The dataset concerns approximately 29,000 Italian professors representing 200 scientific fields. As necessary, the analyses are field normalized. The evidence seems to support the presence of an impact for quantity trade-off. While single-variate analyses show a positive correlation between the two dimensions, a more complex econometric model, controlling for a range of individual characteristics of researchers, indicates a negative marginal effect of the size of a scholar's scientific output on average impact.