Do Norwegian academics who publish more earn higher salaries?

Abstract

Based on a sense of justice one may expect that productive academics with high publication outputs earn higher salaries than less productive academics. However, there is little evidence to support or reject such a belief. This explorative study correlated salary data with publication data for the academic employees of one of the largest HEIs in Norway. The results show that overall there is a weak correlation between publication output and salary. Salary correlates with rank (low, medium, top), and rank correlates with publication output. Within each of the groups, apart from the full professors, there is no positive correlation between how productive an academic is and what an academic earns. In fact, when comparing inactive and active lowranking contract researchers, the results showed that active researchers earned significantly less than what their inactive colleagues did. The results suggest that publishing is not rewarded monetarily and aspiring early career academics should adopt a strategy involving more diverse activities than just publishing to climb the salary ladder.