Scholarly productivity of political scientists in Japan

As an approach to researching the process of producing information, this paper focuses on scholars who are producers of academic information, and examines various factors of scholarly productivity. Among the many factors of productivity, three are selected; the university to which a scholar belongs, the prestige of the graduate schools and media through a scholar publishes the results of his/her research (in this paper, "media" means the journals which carry scholarly articles, and the publishers which publish scholary books). About 828 Japanese political scientists, their publication main records and several factors are examined. The findings are as follows; (1) Almost all Japanese political scientists who belong to distinguished universities (Tokyo University, the four major national universities, and the two major private universities), graduated from these universities. But only one-forth of scholars, who graduated from distinguished universities belong to these universities. (2) All scholars who belong to or graduated from distinguished universities don't necessarily have a high level of productivity. (3) About 90 per cent of the books written by these scholars, are published through general commercial publishers, followed by university bulletins and general commercial journals. (4) In book media, the scholars who graduated from the two major private universities publish about 25 per cent of their works through university presses. In academic journal media, only the scholars who graduated from Tokyo University publish large proportion of their articles through general commercial journal.