Celebrating a Nordic Paper with More than 100 Citations

Graduate students are an important part of the academic workforce. However, little is known on their overall contribution to science. Using the participation in Web of Science indexed peer reviewed publications of the complete population of doctoral students in Quebec over the 2000-2007 period (N=27,393), this thesis achieves three main contributions to the advancement of knowledge. The first contribution of is a technical one and involves the creation of an algorithm which allows the automatic attribution of an important percentage of individual researchers' papers. Using the patterns found in Quebec professors' use of keywords, cited references and discipline of publication, the algorithm automatically assigns or rejects a scientific paper to 88% of doctoral students. The second contribution is to provide a large scale analysis of doctoral students' socialization to research, using the percentage of doctoral students who have published at least one paper during their program as an indicator. It shows that this integration varies greatly among disciplines, with students in the natural and medical sciences being more integrated into research than their colleagues of the social sciences and humanities. Collaboration is an important component of this socialization: disciplines in which collaboration is important are also those were doctoral students are the most integrated into research. Such socialization to research also has a positive effect on students' degree completion and careers in research. Finally, the third contribution of this thesis is to measure the importance of the research output produced by doctoral students for the science system. It shows that PhD students account for 33% of the publication output of the province, a percentage that is considerably higher than that of Quebec hospital researchers taken together and more than 5 times higher than that of federal and industrial researchers of the province. In terms of scientific impact, doctoral students' papers obtain significantly lower citation rates than other Quebec papers to which they have not contributed, although the average impact factor of the journals in which they publish is significantly higher. Overall, this interdisciplinary thesis provide a significant insight into the extent, the context and the effect of socialization to research in the Ph.D. curriculum as well as a better understanding of the importance of doctoral students' scientific contributions within Quebec's science system. These findings should be of great interest to university administrators as well as for research councils and the science policy community in general.