Why research productivity of some scientists is higher? Effects of social, economic and cultural capital on research productivity

In the past decades, the awareness about the concept of research productivity at higher education institutions has improved which led to an increase in the number of studies dealing with the subject. Such studies mostly deal with correlations between research productivity and organizational elements, gender, age, professional experience, and alma mater characteristics. To provide an innovative dimension to the existing studies this study focuses on the interaction between the research productivity of the scientists and their childhood period and childhood setting. In this context, the aim of our study is to examine the effects of cultural, economic, and social capitals on research productivity of both scientists’ current status and their parents’ during their childhood. The data were collected from 9499 faculty members through a survey questionnaire which included items on cultural, economic, and social capital. The data on research productivity of the participants were taken from the Web of Science. The major findings of the study are as follows: (a) Turkish scientists both have lower levels of parents’ level of-during childhood- and their current level of cultural capital, and they mostly come from families with the lower-middle economic level; (b) they have medium level social capital; (c) cultural and social capitals together can account for 69% of research productivity, and the order of the related items are found to be childhood objectified cultural capital, current embodied cultural capital and parents’ embodied cultural capital during childhood; (d) among social capital structures, relational social capital is the strongest predictor of research productivity and (e) economic capital is not a significant predictor of research productivity. We believe that our current findings contribute to the studies on higher education research by uncovering the new relationships between structures.