Inequality in the scientific community: the effects of cumulative advantage among social scientists and humanities scholars in Korea

The primary goal of this paper is to provide a balanced perspective for understanding inequality in research productivity among Korean scholars in humanities and social sciences. Specifically, we examine cumulative advantage over the careers of a sample of Korean social scientists and humanities scholars (N = 8933). Descriptive analyses indicated that the level of inequality among junior humanists and social scientists rivals that found among similar scholars in the USA, and among engineers and natural scientists in Korea. Inequality indices examined over 25 years reveal a U-shaped trajectory for social scientists and an L-shaped trajectory for humanities scholars. In both disciplines, female scholars averaged fewer publications than their male counterparts at any given time in their respective careers. Furthermore, according to results from generalized estimating equations, age at receipt of doctorate and years to doctoral degree completion were negatively associated with the number of publications. The prestige of scholars’ undergraduate and graduate schools also appears to be associated with productivity, though to a greater extent in the social sciences than in the humanities. The results imply that the incentive structure in Korean academia does not necessarily lead to an increase in the number of publications. Rather, it appears that, in the later career stages, activities outside the university become more important than scholarly performance, perhaps due to the tradition of basing wage and promotion systems on seniority.