Academic Inbreeding and Publication Activity Among Teachers and Researchers

Higher Education Quarterly. 2025. Vol. 79. No. 4. Article e70077.

Panova A., Victoria Slepykh

The impact of academic inbreeding on research productivity remains unclear. This study examines a critical yet often overlooked distinction: How the link between inbreeding and publication activity differs when academics' primary focus is teaching versus research. Focusing on highly productive Russian PhD holders, our findings reveal a complex picture. For research-focused academics, inbreeding is related to greater accessibility of different resources to achieve international visibility and recognition via international monographs, and to the greater teaching and administrative workload. For teaching-focused academics, inbreeding is associated with lower publication activity in the top-tier journals and higher publication activity in lower-quartile journals. We observe that mobile teachers have less access to the resources of the academic system, which may be seen as a factor of their lower productivity. Our study challenges simplistic views on academic inbreeding, demonstrating that its relationship with publication activity is multifaceted.

Keywords: публикационная активность, исследователи, преподаватели, researchers, teachers, publication activity, академический инбридинг, российское высшее образование, доступ к ресурсам, Russian higher education, Academic inbreeding, academic roles, resource access, академические роли

Publication based on the results of: The formation of a national higher education system: key changes and their effects (2025)