Publishing a highly cited research paper can increase an?academic¡¯s salary by as much as $13,500 a?year (?9,742), a?study suggests.

By linking publicly available information on pay in three of the US¡¯ largest state university systems to citation data, researchers were able to track how changes in a scholar¡¯s h-index caused by a new paper affected their annual income.

According to the study, published in , an economics professor in the state of Illinois could expect to see their income increase by 8.9 per cent on average ¨C or $13,500 in real terms ¨C if a paper improved their h-index by a one-half standard deviation.

In Florida, an economics professor¡¯s pay was likely to rise by 4.6 per cent ¨C or $6,800 ¨C following a highly cited paper, while in California the increase was almost $4,000, or 2.8 per cent.

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Quantifying the value of a highly cited paper to an individual was important because it showed that academics¡¯ focus on securing such publications went beyond ¡°narcissistic concerns¡± or a mere ¡°desire to establish a kind of academic pecking order among an isolated group of very competitive individuals¡±, explains the paper.

While the results focused tightly on senior staff in economics ¨C where mean incomes for professors were $140,000 to $152,000 ¨C one of the paper¡¯s co-authors, Franklin Mixon, director of Columbus State University¡¯s Center for Economic Education in Georgia, told Times Higher Education that they were ¡°indicative of academia in general¡± and ¡°particularly so for those disciplines whose faculty engage in traditional forms of research such as peer-reviewed journal publication¡±.

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Professor Mixon, who wrote the paper with Florida?Atlantic University economist Jo?o Ricardo Faria, said he hoped the study would help to highlight the consequences of ¡°gaming tactics sometimes used to improve citation scores¡±, he added.

The study suggests that the impact of a highly cited paper on an academic¡¯s pay may be higher than other studies have indicated; a 2012 study focused on economics professors at 43 research-intensive universities pay found that a 10 per cent increase in citations led to a 0.9 per cent rise in faculty salaries, mirroring a 2010 study at the University of California that put the increase in pay at 0.8 per cent if citations rose by 10 per cent.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com