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The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral students’ research productivity is examined with a special focus on gender, parenthood, and the personality trait conscientiousness. Data consist of 614 doctoral students active in medicine, technology, the natural sciences in Sweden. Results indicate that the overall research productivity of doctoral students has increased during COVID-19. It is tested if the observed increase in research productivity depends on gender, parenthood, or conscientiousness. Hypotheses regarding a pandemic penalty for women and parents are not supported. However, results indicate that conscientiousness had a positive effect on doctoral students’ research productivity during the pandemic. It is concluded that conscientiousness has been an important factor in determining the research productivity of doctoral students during COVID-19. The results are discussed with regard to the national context of Sweden, where schools, childcare facilities, and laboratories were open to a larger extent during COVID-19 compared with many other countries.

The effect of personality on doctoral students’ research productivity is understudied in the literature. The objective of this study is to examine the relationship between the personality trait conscientiousness and research productivity among doctoral students. The study is based on a nation-wide data set consisting of 1173 doctoral students in Sweden. Two hypothesis was formulated: (1) Conscientiousness predicts doctoral students research productivity; and (2) Conscientiousness predicts doctoral students co-authoring with the supervisors. It was also asked how the relationship between conscientiousness and research productivity/co-authoring with supervisors differ between research areas. Results supported hypothesis 1 and 2. The main conclusions are that doctoral students with higher conscientiousness co-author more with their supervisors, are more productive during doctoral studies, and that overall the effect of conscientiousness is similar over the research areas.

The numbers of publications within the field of research on approaches to address conflicts in schools is rapidly growing, and it is now important to map influential theories, methods and topics that shape this research field. In addition, student teachers, teachers and teacher educators would benefit from it being easier to find research-based knowledge of how to address conflicts in schools. Therefore, a bibliometric study was carried out on 1126 publications that were published between 1996 and 2019 in this field. The study aimed at examining publication activity, geographic spread, and dominant research topics. The findings showed a positive trend in publication output from 2006 onwards. Research output was found to be dominated by the United States. However, the results also indicated an internationalization trend expressed in an increased geographic spread of publication output. Furthermore, six research topics were identified through cluster analyses and labelled ‘peace and value education’, ‘classroom management from coercive discipline to relationship building’, ‘constructive conflict resolution’, ‘classroom management programmes’, ‘restorative justices and restorative approaches’, and ‘classroom challenges for teachers’. Within each research topic, a distinct number of publications were found that defined the core research.

While this study indicates that there are substantial differences between parents and non-parent doctoral students in terms of collaborating with the supervisor, attending conferences and publish peer-reviewed articles, potential explanations for these differences has not been examined. One explanation could be that parents have more study breaks due to, e.g., sick leave or parental leave. Another explanation could be that parents, due to care responsibilities, have less time to devote to work than non-parents. Examining potential explanations for the observed differences are tasks for future research.

This article provides an explanation for previously observed gender differences in scientific performance during doctoral studies and the early career. Data is based on doctoral students in science, technology, and medicine at a Swedish university. We collected information on each doctoral student’s publication and employment history. We also created publication histories for the doctoral candidates main supervisors. The data was supplemented with information on gender, age, and research area. Informed by theories on academic socialization, our research questions focus on how gender differences in productivity during doctoral studies and the early career relate to research collaboration and behaviour/characteristics of the main supervisor. Results show that the gender gap in productivity during doctoral studies, and the early career, can be explained by the degree to which the doctoral students co-author publications with their main supervisors and the size of their collaborative networks.

Publishing in peer-reviewed journals as a part of the doctoral education is common practice in many countries. The publication output of doctoral students is increasingly used in selection processes for funding and employment in their early careers. Against the backdrop of this development, the aim of this study is to examine (1) how performance during the doctoral education affect the probability of attaining research excellence in the early career; and (2) if there is performance differences between males and females in the early career and to which degree these gender differences can be explained by performance differences during the doctoral education. The data consist of Swedish doctoral students employed at the faculty of science and technology and the faculty of medicine at a Swedish university. Our main conclusions are that (1) research performance during the doctoral education has a positive effect on attaining excellence in the early career; (2) there is an interaction between publication volume and excellence during doctoral education suggesting that a combination of quantity and quality in doctoral students’ performance is indicative of future excellence; (3) there are performance differences in the early career indicating that males have a higher probability of attaining excellence than females, and; (4) this difference is partly explained by performance differences during the doctoral education.

The governance of higher education institutions and science have endured significant changes during the last decades, emphasizing competitiveness, performance, and excellence. Embedded in this development is an increased use of bibliometric indicators as decision support tools in contexts of e.g., employment, appointment, and funding. These changes have gradually extended to the early career phase and the doctoral education.

The aim of this thesis is to make a contribution to an ongoing discussion about the predictability of research performance and the reasonability of using bibliometric indicators in the early career, with a focus on gender differences. The thesis revolves around three overarching research questions focusing the early career and the doctoral education: (1) the degree to which research performance, as operationalized with bibliometric indicators, is predictable; (2) the degree to which gender differences in early career performance can be explained by research performance during the doctoral education; and (3) to what degree factors such as collaboration and supervisor behaviour, might affect gender differences in research performance.

The main results suggests that research performance in the early career, as operationalized by bibliometric indicators, is predictable. Individuals who publish larger volumes, publish more in high prestige journals, and more excellent research early in their career, are more likely to attain excellence later on. The results also indicates that gender differences in performance can be observed as early asduring doctor education and that these differences partly explain the observed performance differences between males and females in the early career.

Finally, the results suggests that gender differences in performance during doctoral education can largely be explained by the doctoral student’s collaborative networks and supervisor behaviour. It is concluded that while research performance, as operationalized by bibliometric indicators, duringthe early career is predictable, there are gender differences in performance that have to be taken into consideration. If they are not, the use of these types of performance indicators in science policy and management might increase the gender gap in science.

Increasing numbers of student teachers, teachers, and teacher educators require training in research‐based knowledge about how to address conflicts in schools. There are also increasing numbers of relevant publications, and hence, a perceived need to map influential theories, methods, and topics that shaped the field of research. To meet this need, a bibliometric study was conducted. The reviewed literature, 608 publications referring to studies by 197 influential authors, was subdivided into two periods: 1996–2010 and 2011–2015. The intellectual structure was examined by author co‐citation analysis. The findings indicate seven clusters of authors from period one and four from period two.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between publication rate, top journal publications and excellence during the first eight years of the career, and how well publication rate, top journal publications and highly cited publications during the first four years of the career can predict whether an author attain excellence in the fifth to the eighth year. The dataset consisted of publication track records of 406 early career mathematicians in the sub-field of number theory collected from the MathSciNet database. Logistic regression and dominance analysis was applied to the data. The major conclusions were (1) publication rate had a positive effect on excellence during the first eighth years of the career. However, those who publish many articles in top journals, which implicitly require a high publication count, had an even higher probability of attaining excellence. These results suggest that publishing in top journals is very important in the process of attaining excellence in the early career in addition to publishing many papers; and (2) a dominance analysis indicated that the number of top journal publications and highly cited publications during the first four years of the career were the most important predictors of who will attain excellence in the later career. The results are discussed in relation to indicator development and science policy.