Academic Inbreeding and Research Productivity in South Korea

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between academic inbreeding and publication rates in domestic journals and international journals among South Korean academics. Design/Methodology/Approach - This paper uses a comprehensive data set on South Korean academics and negative binomial regressions. The endogeneity of academic inbreeding status is mitigated by taking advantage of data on publications in international journals prior to employment. This serves as a proxy for ability and motivation to publish. Findings - The results show that alumni appointees publish fewer international journal articles but more domestic journal articles than their non-alumni counterparts. The results support the suspicion that academic inbreeding status is confounded with ability and motivation to publish. In addition, factors such as discipline, time trends, university rank and gender are shown to interact with academic inbreeding and its impact on international and domestic publication rates. Research Implications - This paper highlights circumstances in which alumni appointees’ research productivity differs with their non-alumni counterparts. In addition, it provides evidence of the endogeneity of academic inbreeding in the research productivity function. Thus, studies that fail to account for this endogeneity are likely to estimate biased effects.