Science of Science

Faculty careers can progress in many directions

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 06:00:00 +0000

Faculty careers can progress in many directions Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/17/2017 - 00:00

Viviane Callier

The canonical story of faculty productivity goes like this: A researcher begins a tenure-track position, builds their research group, and publishes as much as possible to make their case for being awarded tenure. After getting tenure, increased service and administrative responsibilities kick in and research productivity slowly declines. But now, a new study shows that, in computer science at least, the majority of faculty members have different—and more idiosyncratic—productivity trajectories. “There are lots of ways people make careers in academia,” says Daniel Larremore, professor of computer science at the University of Colorado in Boulder and one of the study’s lead authors. “There’s some space to revisit our expectations.”

Based on a comprehensive hiring and promotion dataset and a publication database for all 2453 computer science professors in the United States and Canada, Larremore and his co-authors found a huge range of publication trajectories, including the canonical one as well as many variations. That variability was not previously apparent because earlier studies of scholarly productivity typically focused on small datasets and were biased toward high achievers such as Nobel laureates, says Roberta Sinatra, assistant professor at the Central European University in Budapest.

Larremore’s team found that some faculty members remain very productive after tenure, with their publication rate peaking late in their careers and then declining abruptly. Others experience a productivity decline in the first few years on the tenure track, only to see an uptick in their fifth or sixth year. And still others don’t publish much early on but continually increase their output over the course of their careers. “Even though we have a canonical story about what a career in academia looks like, people are all over the map in reality,” Larremore says.

Ultimately, the authors write in the paper, “[t]his diversity in overall productivity, combined with the observation that an individual’s highest impact work is equally likely to be any of his or her publications, implies there are fundamental limits to predicting scientific careers.” For Jevin West, assistant professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle, that’s a good thing. “I don’t want young scholars to think their trajectory is somehow predestined,” he says. “There’s all sorts of things that lead to big discoveries.” However, cautions Henry Sauermann, associate professor of strategy at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, “the paper doesn’t tell us if all these paths are similarly successful in terms of getting tenure.”

It’s important to recognize that tenure committees rely on more than publication counts when evaluating candidates, says Donna Ginther, a professor of economics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who studies scientific labor markets. These committees also take into account “the impact of the publications, and what the outside letter writers who are experts in the field have to say about the quality, quantity, and impact of the work,” Ginther says, which “may weigh more than the number of publications they’ve produced.” Larremore also emphasizes that publication count doesn’t necessarily reflect the true impact of a scholar’s work. “If you make a software package and it is used by thousands of hospitals, that may be a bigger contribution than five publications,” he says.

In light of the significant variation the new study reveals, funding agencies and hiring, tenure, and promotion committees need to appreciate the diversity of contributions and unpredictability of trajectories, the authors suggest. Evaluators who assume candidates should follow the canonical path may fail to reward people who are following different paths and end up missing out on talented researchers who still have great contributions to make, Sinatra agrees.

Although the data revealed a wide variety of career trajectories, there were also some notable trends. For one thing, men and women follow the canonical trajectory at equal rates, though men showed slightly higher initial and peak productivities. It’s not clear whether those differences are changing over time, moving toward parity in more recent cohorts, or whether differences at the time of hiring become exacerbated as careers progress. The researchers also found that faculty members at more prestigious institutions are more productive initially and have higher peak productivity, reflecting the higher publishing demands at higher-ranked institutions, Ginther notes. “You really need to know what you are getting into before you show up,” she says. “The postdoc can be used as a time to get a lot of work started so you get your publications rolling before you start on that tenure-track clock.”

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Does faculty productivity really decline with age? New study says no

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 06:00:00 +0000

Does faculty productivity really decline with age? New study says no Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/17/2017 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

For 60 years, studies of everyone from psychologists to biologists to mathematicians have shown the same remarkably similar academic research trajectory: Scientists publish prolifically early in their careers, peak after about five years, get tenure and begin a long slow decline in productivity.

But a new CU Boulder study published today in the journal PNASsuggests that stereotype is misleading.

“We found that only about one-fifth of researchers have careers that actually look like that expected curve, and the other 80 percent exhibit a really diverse set of productivity trajectories,” says first author Samuel Way, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science.

Way notes the long-standing narrative has long served as an unofficial yardstick by which faculty are measured, influencing hiring committees to look for young prolific publishers, and some higher education watchdogs to call for the reinstatement of mandatory retirement or other incentives to nudge older faculty to retire.

“What this study tells us is that productivity comes at various stages and there are a lot of different ways to have a successful career as a scientist,” Way says.

The study is co-authored by Allison Morgan, a PhD student in computer science, and Aaron Clauset and Daniel Larremore, assistant professors rostered in computer science and in the BioFrontiers Institute.

The team looked at more than 200,000 publications from 2,453 tenure track faculty in 205 computer science departments in the United States and Canada.

On average, the stereotypical “rapid-rise, gradual-decline” curve held true. But when the researchers used modern computational methods to drill down to individual patterns, they found the curve to be a “remarkably inaccurate” description of most professors’ careers. A considerable number started off slow publication-wise and showed late-career spikes. Others published at a steady rate over time.

It’s important for the public to know that there are professors who do incredible work all throughout their career and also for young faculty to know there is more than one way to be successful.”
–Daniel Larremore

The study also found:

Scientists today are publishing significantly more papers annually on average (four versus one in 1970), likely due to greater collaboration and a trend toward publishing more incremental findings.
Fifty percent of papers are authored by about 20 percent of faculty.
Women published about 46 percent fewer papers than men early in their career, even when trained and hired at similarly ranked institutions. (More research is underway to determine why. Some theorize pregnancy and childrearing responsibilities, and a tendency for women to volunteer more, could be factors.)

While the study looked only at computer scientists, Way believes its findings likely translate to other disciplines.

The paper is the latest in a series of “science of science” papers using computational social science to explore trends in faculty hiring and productivity. Previous papers looking at computer science, business and history have shown that both prestige and gender matter when it comes to who becomes a faculty member and where.

“If you choose a history professor in the United States at random, chances are better than 50 percent that professor came from one of eight universities,” says Larremore, senior author on the newest paper, noting a disproportionately small number of universities produces a disproportionately large number of faculty. “Those eight departments are the ones deciding the research agenda for an entire field. At the same time, it is not clear how much prestige is a good signal of quality.”

Larremore and Clauset’s research, conducted at CU Boulder and at the nonprofit Santa Fe Institute, has also shown the prestige hierarchy underlying faculty hiring has a greater impact on women than on men.

“If a man and a woman both get PhDs from a decent state school, she will tend to get a job at a less prestigious school than he does. If they both went to a highly ranked school, she will get an even lower-ranking job than he does,” Larremore explains.

Larremore and Way both caution publication rates cannot, in and of themselves, serve as a reliable measure of career productivity, as some professors do more mentoring and teaching.

They hope the most recent paper will send a message to faculty members, those in charge of hiring and evaluating them, and the public. Over time, the team hopes their “science of science” papers will help shape policy, says Way.

“The more we understand what faculty need to be successful in science, the more we can go about improving policies to set them up for the best careers possible.”

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