Diversity of success: measuring the scholarly performance diversity of tenured professors in the Israeli academia

In this study we present a method for systematic investigation of the diversity in academic performance and its influence factors among successful scholars. In addition, we examine the potential effect of citation indices on the scholarly performance evaluation. To this end, a quantitative research was conducted on the data of 663 tenured professors, sampled from six faculties in two Israeli universities. The scholars’ productivity and impact rates were collected from the two major citation indices: Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar (GS). A comparison was carried out among the highest impact, lowest impact and average impact scholars in the corpus for each citation index. Significant differences were found between scholars’ performance rates in different impact-level groups in the two indices. The top performing group comprised 44 scholars who belonged to the highest impact sub-corpora according to both citation indices. Linear regression analysis showed that women, despite being a minority in the Israeli academia, outperformed men in terms of scientific impact. Interestingly, there were several differences among the two indices in terms of seniority and performance rates. Our findings provide evidence for the “rich get richer” phenomenon in GS compared to WoS. In WoS mean performance rates stabilize after 15 years of seniority, while in GS performance rates of the scholars constantly grow over time. The study contributes to the evaluation of scholarly success and performance diversity in the academic community. The obtained results provide useful insights on academic success and promotion policies for researchers and institutions.