The Determinants of Research Productivity: A Study of Mexican Researchers

This paper uses a unique data set of Mexican researchers to explore the determinants of research productivity. Our findings confirm a quadratic relationship between age and productivity. However, productivity peaks when researchers are approximately 53 years old, 5 or 10 years later than what prior studies have shown. These results suggest that age is not very important in terms of research productivity. We also find that reputation matters for the number of citations but not publications. Results also show great heterogeneity across areas of knowledge. Interpretations of other aspects, such as gender, country of PhD, cohort effect, among others, are also discussed.