ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a rare scholarly theme of highly productive academics, statistically confirming their pivotal role in knowledge production across Europe. It provides a corroboration of the systematic inequality in knowledge production, for the first time argued for by Alfred Lotka and Derek J. de Solla Price. The chapter presents higher education research: social stratification in science, research productivity, and international comparative academic profession studies, all with a focus on European universities. It explores the personal and institutional characteristics linked to high individual research productivity. The chapter also focuses on a logistic regression model in seeking country-specific predictors of becoming highly productive. It seeks to find odds ratio estimates by logistic regression for being in the top 10 percent in research productivity by country, with blocks of different individual and institutional variables. The chapter explores a distinctive subgroup of highly productive academics from a cross-European comparative perspective to show the complexities inherent in the 'academic profession' concept.
