Academic productivity is a key indicator for researchers, educational institutions and the society as a whole, with a direct impact on the socio-economic growth of a country through the appropriation of knowledge. This study investigates the existence of (club) convergence in academic productivity among various countries and research fields by means of the methodology developed by Phillips and Sul (2007, 2009). More specifically, we focus on the G20 countries and our dataset covers a period of more than 25 years. We examine convergence in publications (per 1 million people) to measure the output level and convergence in citations and self-citations (per publication) to measure the impact of the research output. In few cases, full convergence is supported, while in all other cases we are able to identify convergence clubs. Various robustness tests evaluate the sensitivity of our main findings.

Keywords: club convergence, academic productivity, citations; self-citations, panel data
JEL Classification Codes: C23