Shibayama (2019) Sustainable development of science and scientists: Academic training in life science labs, RP 48(3), 676-692

역시 내 과야, 아니 역시 내가 Sotaro Shibayama과야 싶은 논문이 나와서 일단 정리해둔다. 올해 RP 3번째 이슈. 저번에 Academia 이슈를 SI로 다뤄서 그런가 이번에는 내 관심사가 거의 이 논문 한 편이라고 해도 될 정도로 적다. 

어쨌든 너무 밀린 일이 많은 관계로 일단 아래에 옮긴 하이라이트와 초록만 읽었는데, 학계(특히 이공계)에 있는 사람들이라면 당연하게 여길 내용이다. 개인적으로 이걸 이익/손해 구조에 따른 갈등으로만 푸는 게 아쉬운데 Shibayama라면 본문에서 다른 관점도 다뤘겠지 당연히..?? 어쨌든 조만간 읽어볼 것.  

<Sustainable development of science and scientists: Academic training in life science labs>

links: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.10.030 OR http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733318302701

by Sotaro Shibayama

Highlights

• Academic training transfers frontier knowledge from senior to junior scientists.

• Autonomous training raises juniors' performance in long run but lowers in short run.

• A dilemma is that seniors may not gain from juniors' long-term performance growth.

• This is mitigated when seniors and juniors continue reciprocal relationships.

• Reciprocal relationships reduce juniors' originality, causing another dilemma.

Abstract

Academic training, where senior scientists transfer their knowledge and skills to junior scientists through apprenticeship, plays a crucial role in the development of scientists. This study focuses on two aspects of academic training, autonomy and exploration, to investigate how different modes of training are incentivized and how they affect junior scientists’ performance and career prospects. Drawing on a sample of 162 supervising professors and their 791 PhD students in life science labs in Japanese universities, this study suggests two fundamental conflicts in academic training. First, autonomy granted to PhD students under apprenticeship improves their long-term performance but decreases short-term performance. Because the latter effect costs supervisors, while the former does not benefit them in general, this inter-temporal tradeoff creates an incentive conflict between supervisors and students, inducing non-autonomous training. The short-term cost for supervisors can be compensated in the form of labor input or reputation gain from previous students in the long term, but this typically happens when students are trained with limited scope of exploration, which hinders the originality of students’ knowledge production. This reduces the diversity of knowledge production, presenting another incentive conflict between individual scientists and the collective scientific community.

Keywords: Academic training; Higher education; Academic career; Knowledge transfer; Exploration; Autonomy