Search

This thesis consists of four essays in collaboration and discrimination. The first essay examines the role of collaboration as a determinant of publication productivity in the field of economics, measured by means of citations, journal rank, and journal impact factor. The analysis employs cross-sectional data of 1,512 journal publications published in 2012 in 16 economics journals. The findings show a positive effect of team size on publication productivity, whereas research teams consisting of only one gender perform better in terms of research quality than gender-mixed teams. The analysis also indicates a negative relationship between female-dominated teams and research productivity. The second essay examines the impact of physical attractiveness on productivity. As literature found a strong impact on wages and career progression, it can be either due to discrimination in favour of good-looking people or can reflect an association between attractiveness and productivity. We utilise a context of academic publishing where there is no or limited face-to-face interaction. Using data on 2,800 authors, the results suggest that physical attractiveness has significantly important benefits. The third essay also considers the effect of physical attractiveness, as assessed based on pictures of top scientists, on their probability of winning the Nobel Prize. In contrast, the results show that attractiveness is negatively correlated with the probability of being awarded the Nobel, with the magnitude of this effect being not negligible. The fourth essay analyses the subsequent publication success (i.e., the probability to publish in top journals, the publication productivity) of the contenders in a best paper prize awarded at an academic conference to see whether the winners' papers fare better than those that failed to get the prize, measured by rank and impact factor of the journal, and citations. We employ the data of nominees for the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate prize between 2008 and 2015. The findings indicate that winning has a positive effect on the quality of journals they published as well as the publication productivity, suggesting that scholars who succeed in their early stage of academia tend to success later compared to those who are not outstanding. This thesis contributes to the literature on publication productivity and discrimination in academia by extending the existing literature on these issues. In this context, we explore the determinants of research productivity in economics (e.g., gender, nationality, seniority and others) and how those characteristics impact on productivity. We also investigate the role of beauty, and the presence of appearance-based discrimination, in determining research productivity among mainstream academics. We then re-examine the role of physical attractiveness at the top of the distribution of productivity, among Nobel Prize candidates/winners. Finally, we examine inequality in scientific research outcomes and the role of the so-called Matthew Effect. The findings shed light on the issues of collaboration, discrimination and inequality in academia.

This research started from the observation that the appearance of information contributes to its overall value and that because there is an almost infinite number of possible ways to represent various kinds of information, it is very important to find the one which is going to be the most effective and which conveys as much of the value of the original information. In philosophical terms this concept could be seen as a particular instance of the Platonic vision of the universe, in his latter period, where the real world, the one we share, is only a pale and imperfect imitation of the world of ideas, the perfect one, to which every intellectual should aspire. Images as representations of ideas can help to access or at least get closer to ideas which otherwise would be too difficult to reach for human beings. Appearance has always played a key role in the learning process, as it facilitates the discovery of new concepts by allowing visual association with already familiar ones. This is why metaphors are so important in learning in general, and have therefore proved to be a valuable tool for designing new paradigms when adapting traditional tasks to changed environments. This research has focused on paper books as traditional repositories of information and on the art of paper book design as an effective technique for presenting information that has proven its worth over centuries of use. The next step was to consider if and how to apply the positive experiences from paper book publishing to the production of electronic books. The Visual Book is the result of the translation into electronic terms of the paper book metaphor when applied to scientific publications, with particular emphasis on the visual components of the metaphor. Where possible, the design of the Visual Book has followed the steps of the paper book production process, but it has also employed a technological component to take the new medium into account and has added additional functionalities which the computer can provide to the reader. The evaluation of the Visual Book has shown that the book metaphor has a very high impact on readers, which is particularly due to the firmly established tradition of reading information presented in that form. In this sense the Visual Book experiment has demonstrated both the importance of presentation issues when delivering information, and the value of traditional forms of publishing when defining new ones for an electronic context.

This work is concerned with research in the field of electronic publishing and, more particularly, of electronic books. It concentrates on an analysis of the stages of development of an electronic book from the acquisition of the source material to the actual use of electronic books, with particular attention to the interface design issues. The main objective of this research is to demonstrate the appropriateness of adopting the paper book metaphor for representing electronic books, which are specifically designed to be parts of an electronic library. In addition, these electronic books are produced semi-automatically using a flexible publishing environment. A model for an electronic book (hyper-book) and an environment which supplies tools for generating electronic books (hyper-book builder) have been defined and successively developed. Hyper-books are produced by importing electronic texts (in SGML or ASCII format) into an empty template, and by applying a number of tools in order to provide appropriate layout and reader services. Hyper-books incorporate hypertext features (e.g. history facilities and links), paper book features, and some other computer facilities (e.g. search functions). Design principles for hyper-books have been partially deduced from paper publishing and from experiments with electronic books. An application in the environmental domain (in particular, in the area of Global Change) was developed and used in order to evaluate the hyper-book system. The objectives of the evaluation were mainly to assess system usability and utility. An evaluation conducted by assigning a number of tasks to two different groups of subjects (computer experts and computer non-experts) has demonstrated that both groups achieved a good performance; therefore, computer expertise does not represent a significant aid in order to perform better or execute tasks quickly. These results lead to the conclusion that the system is easy to learn and use by everyone, therefore it is appropriate to employ the book metaphor.

During the final decades of the nineteenth century girls' culture flourished. As recent scholarship has shown, this culture pivoted on an engagement with fiction and particularly the periodical press. Magazines such as the Girl's Own Paper and the Monthly Packet provided spaces where girls could benefit from being part of a larger network of contributors. The reciprocal reading and writing culture accessed through periodicals epitomised the experience of a creative and intellectual adolescence for many girls during the late-Victorian era. This thesis explores a discrete girls' culture that was also cultivated in diaries and circulated manuscript magazines during this period. As these writings were shared with family or peers respectively, they can be viewed as tools of socialisation or 'apprenticeships' in writing, as well as in girlhood. Yet girls' writings were also sites of resistance; in responding to the model literary and print culture in which they were immersed, girls cultivated an autonomous writing culture which hinged on strategies of adaptation and appropriation. Sociological theories of youth culture have demonstrated that young people actively contribute to cultural reproduction and change. When combined with theories of literary appropriation in this thesis, these insights shed light on the specific types of authorship which reflect girls' simultaneous participation in and exclusion from a dynamic literary and print culture. This thesis analyses the development of girls' literary culture in the late-Victorian manuscript writings. Moreover it contextualises girls' appropriative writing culture in broader debates concerning late-Victorian literature and publishing, gender and Girls Studies. Through considering little- or never-before-studied girls' manuscripts and texts as integral to late-Victorian literary culture, this thesis makes a significant and original contribution to these flourishing research areas. It contributes to the lively debate in childhood studies which seeks to assign agency to children in the archive, as well as the ongoing feminist project to incorporate female writings into the study of literary history.