Modelling Academics as Agents: An Implementation of an Agent-Based Strategic Publication Model 1.3.0
This agent-based model draws on the hypothetical “strategic publication model” proposed by Mölders, Fink and Weyer (2011), and extends this work by defining experimental settings to implement a prototype ABMS in NetLogo.
This agent-based model simulates academics submit papers to journals based on their own submission strategies. In this model, there are two types of agents: academics and journals. The academic agents are categorized as either a “careerist”, “orthodox scientist”, or “mass producer”, and journals are characterized by the criteria of impact factor (IF), acceptance rate (AR), and topical fitting factor (TFF). Academics in each of the three categories have a specific order of preferences for the different journal criteria. In this hypothetical model, the decision making of an academic agent involves a simple choice regarding where to submit a paper on a given topic, to one of the various types of journal.
The purpose of this model is to explore the emergent phenomena associated with scientific publication, including quantity and quality, from different types of academics based on their publication strategies in an academic system.
