Marco Seeber

• Rizzo, Ugo; Rentocchini, Francesco; Seeber, Marco & Ramaciotti, Laura (2026). Beyond the badge of honour: the effect of the academic excellence initiative on staff recruitment in Italy. Oxford Economic Papers. ISSN 0030-7653. 78(2), p. 309–334. doi: 10.1093/oep/gpaf032. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Understanding how excellence-based funding affects academic recruitment is central to evaluating the broader implications of performance-oriented research policies. We study the Department of Excellence Initiative (“Dipartimenti di Eccellenza”) in the Italian higher education system. Unlike other excellence initiatives in Europe, this programme was directed at departments rather than universities. We investigate the effect of the initiative on new faculty positions, distinguishing between external recruitment and internal promotion, as well as different career stages. We also analyse heterogeneity across departmental categories, differentiating between first-tier (top-rated) and second-tier (near-elite) departments. Our findings indicate a positive effect on the creation of new faculty positions within funded departments, particularly through external recruitment and across various career stages. Notably, we provide evidence of greater benefits accruing to second-tier departments relative to their first-tier counterparts, particularly with respect to entry-level tenure-track positions.

• Seeber, Marco; Cattaneo, Mattia; Birolini, Sebastian & Seeber, Michele (2026). Academic publishing business models: Self-citations and the selectivity–reputation trade-off. Quantitative Science Studies (QSS). 7, p. 877–906. doi: 10.1162/QSS.a.481. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The growth of scientific journals is constrained by a trade-off between selectivity and reputation. A strong reputation attracts submissions but enhancing reputation requires selectivity, meaning many submissions must be rejected. Conversely, lowering selectivity allows journals to publish more papers but also lowers the average quality of published work, undermining reputation and eventually attracting fewer submissions. Because of this trade-off, scientific journals display moderate growth rates. In recent years, however, some publishers whose revenues depend largely on gold open access (OA) article processing charges (APC) have displayed staggering growth rates. One strategy to circumvent the selectivity–reputation trade-off is to inflate self-citations contributing to the journal impact factor (JIF). We investigate the citation flows of 8,360 journals from the 20 largest for-profit publishers included in the Journal Citation Report by Clarivate, over a period of 25 years (1997–2021). Using a gravity model of journal citation flows, we find that Gold OA journals display high self-citation rates, particularly to articles contributing to the JIF. This pattern is much more pronounced among journals owned by two large Gold OA publishers. Moreover, the intensity of self-citations for these two publishers’ journals increased with growth rate, suggesting that self-citations contributed to counteracting a decline in citations resulting from rapid expansion.

• Debernardi, Carlo & Seeber, Marco (2026). Diversification over the scientific career: the impact of seniority, mobility, and collaboration. Higher Education. ISSN 0018-1560. doi: 10.1007/s10734-026-01677-3. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  For a successful academic career, scholars must be both productive and innovative in their research. This leads to an essential tension between exploitation and exploration. Qualitative research has highlighted some micro-level factors affecting scientists’ development of their research agenda, but there is scant knowledge about the role played by the institutional context and practices, and little quantitative evidence. This article provides a longitudinal comparative study of 4,785 scientists in four research areas (i.e., Sociology and Political Science, Economics and Econometrics, Immunology, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics) in four European university systems. The existence of a “protected space” has been identified as a crucial condition for exploration. We argue that interactions between a researcher’s seniority, scientific mobility, and – crucially – the discipline in which they work, affect the protected space and hence the capability to diversify their individual research agenda. We examined the textual content of the abstracts of 141,690 publications collected from Scopus and explored which factors affected research diversification over the career of individuals, namely a publication’s diversity compared to the most similar past publication of the same author. We reconstructed the spread of each scholar’s publications within an embedding space obtained via a Large Language Model. The results show that seniority positively affects diversification. Mobility is also positively associated with diversification, especially in disciplinary areas where individuals have more limited protected space. Finally, new scientific collaborations are the stronger predictor of an increase in diversification.

• Seeber, Marco; Debernardi, Carlo & Piro, Fredrik Niclas (2026). The influence of research topics on ERC grant success: bottom-up, but not topic-neutral. Research Evaluation. ISSN 0958-2029. 35. doi: 10.1093/reseval/rvag001. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The European Research Council (ERC) is one of the most important research funding schemes of the European Union, supporting investigator-driven, excellent, frontier research. The ERC’s governing bodies have upheld the scheme’s ‘bottom-up’ approach, resisting any attempts to promote specific research topics. However, the selection process is not necessarily topic-neutral. Research has provided very limited evidence on the influence of a proposal’s research topic on its chances to be funded. This article addresses this gap by investigating what the research topics of ERC proposals are, how the proposals’ research topics vary across framework programs, countries, type of organization and grant, and whether a proposal’s research topic predicts the chances of being funded. We use state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to examine the textual content of the abstract of 91,273 proposals for Starting, Consolidator, and Advanced Grants in the Seventh Framework Program (FP7) and Horizon 2020 (H2020)—that is, 95.3% of all the proposals, identifying 188 unique research topics. The proportion of proposals in each topic changed substantially from FP7 to H2020 programs, with one in four increasing or decreasing by more than 20% in relative terms. The research topic of a proposal is related to variation in success rates: 37.4% of proposals fall within topics that display significantly higher or lower chances of being funded. At the same time, the composition of the research topics of the funded proposals is similar to a hypothetical scenario in which topics did not affect success (80.8% overlap). The results suggest that the selection process on what is researched does not overturn the nature of ERC as a bottom-up program.

• Seeber, Marco; Cattaneo, Mattia; Debernardi, Carlo & Pina, David G. (2025). The effect of public funding on long-term relocation of experienced researchers: An analysis of the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant. Quantitative Science Studies (QSS). 6(2025), p. 281–304. doi: 10.1162/qss_a_00350. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Scientific mobility often benefits researchers’ productivity and networks but may lead to unbalanced flows from less to more attractive countries. This is the first quantitative study to examine a mobility program aimed at tackling this problem by favoring relocation within a geographical domain, by supporting the long-term relocation of experienced researchers: the Career Integration Grant (CIG), a funding scheme of the Marie Curie Actions under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme. The CIG aimed to reinforce the European Research Area and counter the European brain drain to third countries by supporting the long-term relocation of experienced researchers in EU member states or associated countries. We consider three yearly calls between 2011 and 2013 and explore the effect on the chances of long-term relocation at country and institutional level. We find that obtaining the grant related to greater chances of long-term relocation in the host institution (+9.4%) and country (+8.2%). The grant was particularly effective for applicants’ subcategories that typically have less access to alternative funding sources: (a) nontenured, (b) scientists from soft sciences, (c) non “returnees,” and (d) moving to nonhigh-ranked institutions. We do not find a relationship with the probability of obtaining a tenured position or on scientific productivity.

• Seeber, Marco (2024). Changes in scientific publishing and possible impact on authors’ choice of journals. ChemTexts. 10(3). doi: 10.1007/s40828-024-00190-3. Full text in Research Archive
• Seeber, Marco; Svege, Ida & Hesselberg, Jan Ole (2024). Improving the efficiency of research proposals evaluation: A two-stage procedure. Research Evaluation. ISSN 0958-2029. p. 1–11. doi: 10.1093/reseval/rvae020. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  An important share of research funding is allocated via competitive programs, which entail considerable direct and indirect costs, such as to develop and evaluate the proposals. The goal of this article is to explore whether adopting a two-stage evaluation procedure could improve the efficiency of the process. For this purpose, we study the evaluation system designed by the Foundation Dam (Stiftelsen Dam), one of the largest foundations in Norway supporting health research. In 2020, Foundation Dam adopted a new evaluation procedure consisting in a short proposal for a first stage of selection and, for those selected, a second-stage evaluation of a long proposal. We explore whether such a procedure reduces the evaluation costs and how the evaluation procedures compare in terms of reliability. Survey responses from 94 of the 594 applicants in the one-stage procedure (2018–19) and all the 668 applicants in the two-stage procedure (2020–21) show that the two-stage procedure reduced the average time that applicants spent in drafting the proposal(s) by 38%. According to the reviewers’ estimate, the two-stage procedure also reduced by 28% the time they spent on average to evaluate an applicant’s proposal(s). The analysis of the evaluation data of 594 long proposals in the one-stage procedure and 668 short proposals in the two-stage procedure shows that reviewers’ scores of short proposals display greater reliability and agreement than the reviewers’ scores of long proposals in the old one-stage procedure. Our findings suggest that a two-stage procedure can substantially improve the efficiency of grant writing and review, without harming the reliability of the evaluation.

• Debernardi, Carlo; Seeber, Marco & Cattaneo, Mattia (2024). Thirty years of climate change research: A fine-grained analysis of geographical specialization. Environmental Science and Policy. ISSN 1462-9011. 152. doi: 10.1016/j.envsci.2023.103663. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Bibliometric overviews of climate change research typically focus on the main topical trends and few countries with the largest share of the scientific production. These are important limitations: most of the world’s population live in countries that are heavily affected by climate change but have a relatively small scientific production, so that their topics of interest might be neglected. This contribution aims to address both limitations by investigating variations across countries in climate change research specialization. We employ a combination of state-of-the-art language modelling techniques to gain a fine-grained representation of the research topics on climate change, considering abstracts of 193,471 publications from 1990 to 2020. The analysis reveals the existence of five major country blocks, with distinct research specializations. Countries’ research specialization is driven by the specific challenges posed by climate change, such as extreme precipitation and floods and food, as well as the level of resources at disposal, so that research into the phenomenon of climate change and its global solutions is more important in affluent western countries. Less affluent countries – which host several billion people – develop distinct research focuses on local problems’ causes and mitigation strategies, but typically have limited resources to address these challenges. Hence, leading scientific countries should possibly contribute even more to addressing such issues.

• Tutuncu, Lokman & Seeber, Marco (2024). The importance of international and national publications for promotion and the impact of recruitment policies. Higher Education. ISSN 0018-1560. doi: 10.1007/s10734-024-01306-x. Full text in Research Archive
• Piro, Fredrik Niclas; Seeber, Marco & Wang, Lili (2024). Regional and sectoral variations in the ability to attract funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program and Horizon 2020. Scientometrics. ISSN 0138-9130. 129, p. 1493–1521. doi: 10.1007/s11192-024-04942-3. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The funding from the European Union’s Framework Programs for Research and Innovation (EU FPs) is skewed across European countries and institutions. The goal of this article is to deepen our understanding of this skewness by incorporating a regional (NUTS-2) and a sectoral (higher education sector and private sector) perspective when studying the ability to attract 71.6 billion euros of research funding distributed by the EU Framework Programs between 2007 and 2020, and to explore how it changed from FP7 to Horizon 2020. We explore the ability to attract grant funding per unit of R&D personnel, and how it is affected by a region’s volume of research personnel, R&D investments, research intensity, level of development, and mediated by the amount of funding requested. In the private sector, we find that several Southern European regions are highly capable of attracting funding, primarily through a high proposal intensity, e.g., large amounts of funding requested. In the higher education sector, regions in the so-called “blue banana” are particularly able to attract funding, due to high levels of R&D investments, strong research intensity, and a high amount of funding requested. From FP7 to Horizon 2020, we observe increasing divergence in the ability to attract funding in the private sector, in favor of peripheral regions, which aligns with the aims of the European Commission's cohesion policy.

• Seeber, Marco; Vlegels, Jef & Cattaneo, Mattia (2022). Conditions that do or do not disadvantage interdisciplinary research proposals in project evaluation. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. ISSN 2330-1635. doi: 10.1002/asi.24617. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Despite interdisciplinary research playing a pivotal role in modern science, interdisciplinary research proposals appear to have a lower chance of being funded. Scholars suggested that interdisciplinary research may be disadvantaged in the evaluation and should be earmarked specific resources and evaluated by specific panels. However, empirical evidence is limited regarding the conditions under which interdisciplinary proposals are disadvantaged. We explore this issue in the context of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) research funding framework, which, contrary to the common practice, does not organize the evaluation process around disciplinary panels, but with a panel-free system. The sample includes data from five calls, from March 2015 to September 2017, for a total of 1,928 proposals, and 5,330 evaluations conducted by 3,050 reviewers. We find that the effect of a proposal’s degree of interdisciplinarity is negligible and not significant. We found no variation in this result across scientific fields and disciplinary expertise of reviewers, and no evidence of disciplinary “turf wars.” These results suggest that factors assumed to disadvantage interdisciplinary proposals, such as being inherently more challenging to be evaluated and being riskier, are less problematic when the evaluation is not organized around disciplinary panels but rather with a panel-free system.

• Seeber, Marco; Alon, Ilan; Pina, David G.; Piro, Fredrik Niclas & Seeber, Michele (2022). Predictors of applying for and winning an ERC Proof-of-Concept grant: An automated machine learning model. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. ISSN 0040-1625. 184. doi: 10.1016/j.techfore.2022.122009. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Research often fails to be translated into applications because of lack of financial support. The Proof of Concept (PoC) funding scheme from the European Research Council (ERC) supports the early stages of the valorization process of the research conducted by its grantees. This article explores the factors that predict who will apply for ERC grants and which grant proposals will prove successful. By combining information from two datasets of 10,074 ERC grants (representing 8361 individual grantees) and 2186 PoC proposals, and using automated machine learning, we can identify the main predictors of the propensity to apply and to win. Doing so fills a void in the literature on likelihood to apply. The results reveal major differences between potential and actual beneficiaries, due to decisions about applying for a grant and evaluations of the proposals. The decision to apply is affected by the interaction between the characteristics of the PoC funding scheme, the ERC grantee, and his/her environment. Grantees in countries that invest little in innovation, with low cost of personnel, and strong collaboration in innovation are more likely to apply. Male grantees are more likely to apply but have similar chances of winning as women.

• Seeber, Marco & Mampaey, Jelle (2021). How do university systems' features affect academic inbreeding? Career rules and language requirements in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Higher Education Quarterly. ISSN 0951-5224. doi: 10.1111/hequ.12302. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Studies on academic inbreeding have mostly focused on institutional inbreeding and its negative effects, whereas little research has explored its causes. We identify current explanations of the macro‐, meso‐ and micro‐level factors that sustain academic inbreeding as well as research gaps. We address a main research gap regarding what macro‐level factors contribute to academic inbreeding, by analysing systems’ norms and rules regulating access to senior academic positions and teaching language requirements in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, the largest public university systems of the European Union. The analysis reveals that career rules designed to guarantee quality may have unintended effects in terms of academic inbreeding. Most importantly, the habilitation procedures pose greater challenges to international candidates and often increase barriers between disciplines as well. In some disciplines and regions, language requirements contribute substantially to academic inbreeding.

• Seeber, Marco & Horta, Hugo (2021). No road is long with good company. What factors affect Ph.D. student’s satisfaction with their supervisor? Higher Education Evaluation and Development (HEED). ISSN 2514-5789. 15(1), p. 2–18. doi: 10.1108/HEED-10-2020-0044. Full text in Research Archive
• Seeber, Marco; Vlegels, Jef; Reimink, Elwin; Marušić, Ana & Pina, David G. (2021). Does reviewing experience reduce disagreement in proposals evaluation? Insights from Marie Skłodowska-Curie and COST Actions. Research Evaluation. ISSN 0958-2029. doi: 10.1093/reseval/rvab011. Full text in Research Archive
• Huisman, Jeroen; Vlegels, Jef; Daenekindt, Stijn; Seeber, Marco & Laufer, Melissa (2021). How satisfied are international students? The role of town, gown and motivations. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. ISSN 0305-7925. 52(8). doi: 10.1080/03057925.2020.1867826. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  A growing literature addresses the experiences of international students in higher education. However, limited attention has been paid to how satisfied international students are with their educational experience (gown) and their non-educational experiences related to, e.g. culture, transportation, administrative matters and housing (town). This paper presents findings from a study on 392 international students that have spent a period in one of the higher education institutions located in the city of Ghent, Belgium. We explore which socio-demographic variables and students’ motivations predict their overall satisfaction and satisfaction regarding specific dimensions: housing, culture/lifestyle, education and administration. The findings illustrate that financial security and academic motivation positively predict general satisfaction as well as all or most of the four specific dimensions of satisfaction. Socio-demographic variables hardly play a role, apart from religion and the difference between the home and host country’s level of educational development.

• Civera, Alice; Cattaneo, Mattia; Meoli, Michele; Paleari, Stefano & Seeber, Marco (2020). Universities’ responses to crises: the influence of competition and reputation on tuition fees. Higher Education. ISSN 0018-1560. 82. doi: 10.1007/s10734-020-00622-2. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Modern societies regularly face crises that have major disruptive effects. Learning from past crises can inform better choices and policies when facing a new one. Following the 2008 global financial crisis, higher education scholars explored its effects on students’ tuition fees through cuts in public funding. This article instead investigates how universities’ decisions on tuition fees have been affected by other factors, beyond the decrease in public funds. As such, it explores the role of competition and reputation in affecting universities’ decisions on tuition fees when facing a crisis. Using data from 59 public Italian universities in the period between 2003 and 2014, we found that universities increased tuition fee by an average of 27% per student in response to the crisis. At the same time, high competition mitigated the increase of tuition fees, except for the case of highly reputed universities, which charged even higher tuition. These findings highlight the importance of monitoring fees in times of crises, as well as the complex role of competition and reputation in containing or inflating university tuition fees.

• Squazzoni, Flaminio; Ahrweiler, Petra; Barros, Tiago; Bianchi, Federico; Birukou, Aliaksandr & Blom, Harry J. J. [Show all 28 contributors for this article] (2020). Unlock ways to share data on peer review. Nature. ISSN 0028-0836. 578(7796), p. 512–514. doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-00500-y. Full text in Research Archive
• Seeber, Marco (2020). Framework and operationalisation challenges for quantitative comparative research in higher education. Higher Education Quarterly. ISSN 0951-5224. 74(2), p. 162–175. doi: 10.1111/hequ.12245. Full text in Research Archive
• Seeber, Marco (2020). How do journals of different rank instruct peer reviewers? Reviewer guidelines in the field of management. Scientometrics. ISSN 0138-9130. 122, p. 1387–1405. doi: 10.1007/s11192-019-03343-1. Full text in Research Archive

View all works in NVA

• Seeber, Marco; Klemenčič, Manja; Meoli, Michele & Sin, Cristina (2023). Publishing review reports to reveal and preserve the quality and fairness of the peer review process. European Journal of Higher Education. ISSN 2156-8235. doi: 10.1080/21568235.2023.2192549. Full text in Research Archive
• Seeber, Marco; Piro, Fredrik Niclas & Debernardi, Carlo (2023). Winning an ERC grant: country and institutional variations in success rate and their causes. Full text in Research Archive
• Seeber, Marco; Debacker, Noemi; Meoli, Michele & Vandevelde, Karen (2022). Exploring the effects of mobility and foreign nationality on internal career progression in universities. Higher Education. ISSN 0018-1560. doi: 10.1007/s10734-022-00878-w. Full text in Research Archive
• Seeber, Marco; Debacker, Noëmi; Meoli, Michele & Vandevelde, Karen (2022). Correction to: Exploring the effects of mobility and foreign nationality on internal career progression in universities (Higher Education, (2022), 10.1007/s10734-022-00878-w). Higher Education. ISSN 0018-1560. doi: 10.1007/s10734-022-00944-3. Full text in Research Archive
• Seeber, Marco & Wang, Lili (2022). Regional and sectorial variations in attractiveness of funding from the European Union’s Framework Programs: evidence of increasing divergence. Full text in Research Archive
• Piro, Fredrik Niclas; Seeber, Marco & Wang, Lili (2022). Regional and sectorial variations in attractiveness of funding from the European Union’s Framework Programs: evidence of increasing divergence. Full text in Research Archive
• Seeber, Marco (2022). Efficacy, efficiency, and models of journal peer review. The known and unknown in the social sciences. In Engels, Tim & Kulczycki, Emanuel (Ed.), Handbook on Research Assessment in the Social Sciences. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISSN 9781800372542. doi: 10.4337/97818003725. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of current developments, issues and good practices regarding assessment in social science research. It pays particular attention to the challenges in evaluation policies in the social sciences, as well as to the specificities of publishing in the area.

View all works in NVA