＂Questionable＂ Behaviors and Practices in Academic Productivity in Postgraduate Studies in Mexico

This paper reports the results acquired in a research work about ＂questionable＂ practices and behaviors in the academic production of researches and postgraduate social sciences and humanities studies of the programs that are appointed by the National Program of Quality Postgraduate Studies （PNPC, by its acronym in Spanish） in Mexico. Through a qualitative methodology, the authors interpreted some of the arguments that explain and/or justify certain practices in relation to doubled production, authorship, and coauthorship of academic products. In this paper, the authors present and analyze the results that they obtained after reviewing documents produced by professors and students of six postgraduate programs that are taught in two Mexican public universities. At the same time, the authors examine some of the practices that take place within said programs, given the institutional demands of improving finished studies efficiency. One of the hypotheses of this work is the demands that are imposed by external evaluations of academic processes on professors and their programs in order to reach desirable rates with the purpose of maintaining or increasing the levels of productivity, gives way to certain practices that must be analyzed. This work＇s theoretic framework is constituted by the contributions of career sociology and professional ethics.

Characterizing scientific elites:publication and citation patterns of outstanding scientists in biomedicine

Science is principally driven by the efforts of a small fraction of researchers publishing the m ajority of scientific research and garnering the m ajority of citations.The quantitative analysis of outstanding scientists’publication and citation patterns provides a new perspective fo r understanding of scientific talents.The study of outstanding scientists can enhance our understanding of the publication and citation patterns and their scientific careers more generally.Based on 35,315 research papers from the biomedical field,we analyzed the academic productivity and influence characteristics of 244 outstanding scientists in biomedical field.Several interesting patterns are observed as follows:as outstanding scientists’career age increased,(1)their scientific output shows a trend of decreasing after increasing,(2)their academic influence shows a trend of continuous growth,(3)their number of the co-authors in their scientific career first increases and then remains stable,and(4)the number of their research areas first decreases and then increases.