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PurposeHow frequently may be advisable for a supervisor to meet a PhD student? Are PhD students more satisfied if supervised by someone of the same gender, nationality or with common research interests? Thus far, we lack quantitative evidence regarding similar crucial aspects of managing PhD supervision. The goal of this study is hence to investigate what factors affect Ph.D. students' satisfaction about the professional and personal relationships with their supervisors.Design/methodology/approachWe focus on the characteristics of the interactions between the student and the supervisor, controlling for other important factors, namely, the supervisor's and student's traits, and the characteristics of the context. We employ survey responses from 971 Ph.D. students at two public, research-oriented and internationally renowned universities in Hong Kong and South Korea.FindingsThe results show the importance of meeting the supervisor at least once per week. Students are more satisfied of the relationship with their supervisor when they have similar research interests, whereas a key finding is that similarity in terms of gender or nationality does not matter. We also found remarkable differences between disciplines in the level of satisfaction (up to 30%), and that students are more satisfied when the supervisor is strongly involved in international research, whereas satisfaction is negatively affected by the number of Ph.D. students supervised.Originality/valueThe article's findings suggest that students are not more satisfied of their relationship with their supervisors when they have the same gender or nationality, whereas it is other traits of their interaction, such as the frequency of meetings and the similarity of research interest, which matter.

Choosing the journal to which submit the results of a scientific work constitutes an important and challenging decision. It is especially crucial to correctly assess the reputation and prospects of the journal. This article describes and comments on the major changes that recently deeply modified the scientific publishing system and analyzes how they potentially undermine the reliability of the bibliometric indicators commonly used to assess a journal’s quality. In view of these elements, some key points are highlighted and discussed that can condition the choice of the journal. The article aims to be especially informative for future scientists navigating the complex world of the current scientific publishing system.

The funding from the European Union’s Framework Programs for Research and Innovation (EU FPs) is skewed across European countries and institutions. The goal of this article is to deepen our understanding of this skewness by incorporating a regional (NUTS-2) and a sectoral (higher education sector and private sector) perspective when studying the ability to attract 71.6 billion euros of research funding distributed by the EU Framework Programs between 2007 and 2020, and to explore how it changed from FP7 to Horizon 2020. We explore the ability to attract grant funding per unit of R&D personnel, and how it is affected by a region’s volume of research personnel, R&D investments, research intensity, level of development, and mediated by the amount of funding requested. In the private sector, we find that several Southern European regions are highly capable of attracting funding, primarily through a high proposal intensity, e.g., large amounts of funding requested. In the higher education sector, regions in the so-called “blue banana” are particularly able to attract funding, due to high levels of R&D investments, strong research intensity, and a high amount of funding requested. From FP7 to Horizon 2020, we observe increasing divergence in the ability to attract funding in the private sector, in favor of peripheral regions, which aligns with the aims of the European Commission's cohesion policy.

In recent decades internationalization has risen to prominence in higher education institutions (HEIs). Scholars have identified several rationales for internationalization. There is however a lack of conceptual understanding and empirical evidence for which rationale(s) for internationalization are chosen by a given HEI and why. The goal of this article is to fill this gap. We develop and test a conceptual framework to predict the salience of a given rationale for a specific HEI. The framework integrates factors at multiple levels, namely competitive and institutional forces in the global and national contexts, the organizational goals and the influence of internal actors. The empirical analysis employs information on more than 400 European HEIs from two large datasets on their organizational characteristics and from a large-scale survey on internationalization of universities. The findings show that the HEIs embedded in a global context more frequently conceive internationalization as an instrumental to prestige. The national contexts do not greatly affect HEIs' rationales, and the amount of resources is less important than the competition for resources. Organizational goals as well as the influence of students, faculty members and middle managers on the internationalization process partly predict the prominence of specific rationales. The paper closes discussing the findings and the implication for scholarly research.(HRK / Abstract übernommen).

This paper focuses on policy implementation in Higher Education (HE) analysed through the evolution and transformation of policy instruments related to government funding and evaluation. We investigate how steering and governance tools have been put into action, in order to analyse how original policy rationales and justifications have evolved and are affected by context and instrument characteristics. The research questions are: what do policy instruments reveal about the evolution of policy rationales and justifications? To what extent and why do they evolve in unpredictable ways? We look at two types of instruments, funding and evaluation that are tools widely diffused in European HE systems. We adopt a diachronic perspective spanning the last 15 years, and a comparative approach across eight European countries. Our findings show that the form and evolution of instruments are related to factors such as the existing mix of instruments and policy paradigm, of the features of the policy process and of the instruments themselves.

This article explores how organizational mobility and foreign nationality affect a researcher’s chances of an internal career promotion in university systems that do not have rules preventing inbreeding and where teaching occurs mostly not in English but a local language. As a case study, we have examined the Flemish university system, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, and developed expectations on the chances of promotion for mobile and foreign researchers compared to non-mobile and nationals. We use data for all postdoctoral and professorial staff between 1991 and 2017, for a total of 14,135 scientists. We calculated the chances of promotion with a competing risk model to take time into account and to disentangle the probability of two mutually exclusive risk events: promotion and leaving the university. The results show that international mobility and foreign nationality reduced the chances of promotion in the same university, and that mobile and foreign scientists were also more likely to leave any given university. These effects were particularly strong at an early stage: in the study period, 21.9% of non-mobile national postdocs became professor compared to just 1.2% of internationally mobile foreigners. These results would suggest that internationally mobile and foreign scientists struggle to advance in universities that lack rules preventing inbreeding and with little opportunity to teach in English.

How do Higher Education Institutions respond to steering attempts in different disciplines? How can different responses be explained? Case studies have been developed in the Italian Higher Education context and at the departmental level, with a focus on government interventions through funding and evaluation of research. The paper tests the predictions of the model proposed by Oliver (1991) to forecast acquiescence and resistance to external pressures, and develops a new model to interpret and predict organisational response from a wider perspective. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

Scientific mobility often benefits researchers’ productivity and networks but may lead to unbalanced flows from less to more attractive countries. This is the first quantitative study to examine a mobility program aimed at tackling this problem by favoring relocation within a geographical domain, by supporting the long-term relocation of experienced researchers: the Career Integration Grant (CIG), a funding scheme of the Marie Curie Actions under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme. The CIG aimed to reinforce the European Research Area and counter the European brain drain to third countries by supporting the long-term relocation of experienced researchers in EU member states or associated countries. We consider three yearly calls between 2011 and 2013 and explore the effect on the chances of long-term relocation at country and institutional level. We find that obtaining the grant related to greater chances of long-term relocation in the host institution (+9.4%) and country (+8.2%). The grant was particularly effective for applicants’ subcategories that typically have less access to alternative funding sources: (a) nontenured, (b) scientists from soft sciences, (c) non “returnees,” and (d) moving to nonhigh-ranked institutions. We do not find a relationship with the probability of obtaining a tenured position or on scientific productivity.

Modern societies regularly face crises that have major disruptive effects. Learning from past crises can inform better choices and policies when facing a new one. Following the 2008 global financial crisis, higher education scholars explored its effects on students’ tuition fees through cuts in public funding. This article instead investigates how universities’ decisions on tuition fees have been affected by other factors, beyond the decrease in public funds. As such, it explores the role of competition and reputation in affecting universities’ decisions on tuition fees when facing a crisis. Using data from 59 public Italian universities in the period between 2003 and 2014, we found that universities increased tuition fee by an average of 27% per student in response to the crisis. At the same time, high competition mitigated the increase of tuition fees, except for the case of highly reputed universities, which charged even higher tuition. These findings highlight the importance of monitoring fees in times of crises, as well as the complex role of competition and reputation in containing or inflating university tuition fees.