The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory

Abstract

A scientist may publish tens or hundreds of papers over a career, but these contributions are not evenly spaced in time. Sixty years of studies on career productivity patterns in a variety of fields suggest an intuitive and universal pattern: productivity tends to rise rapidly to an early peak and then gradually declines. Here, we test the universality of this conventional narrative by analyzing the structures of individual faculty productivity time series, constructed from over 200,000 publications and matched with hiring data for 2453 tenure-track faculty in all 205 Ph.D-granting computer science departments in the U.S. and Canada. Unlike prior studies, which considered only some faculty or some institutions, or lacked common career reference points, here we combine a large bibliographic dataset with comprehensive information on career transitions that covers an entire field of study. We show that the conventional narrative confidently describes only one fifth of faculty, regardless of department prestige or researcher gender, and the remaining four fifths of faculty exhibit a rich diversity of productivity patterns. To explain this diversity, we introduce a simple model of productivity trajectories, and explore correlations between its parameters and researcher covariates, showing that departmental prestige predicts overall individual productivity and the timing of the transition from first-to last-author publications. These results demonstrate the unpredictability of productivity over time, and open the door for new efforts to understand how environmental and individual factors shape scientific productivity. INTRODUCTIONScholarly publications serve as the primary mode of communication through which scientific knowledge is developed, discussed, and disseminated. The amount that an individual researcher contributes to this dialoguetheir scholarly productivity-thus serves as an important measure of the rate at which they contribute units of knowledge to the field, and this measure is known to influence the placement of graduates into faculty jobs [1], the likelihood of being granted tenure [2,3], and the ability to secure funding for future research [4].The trajectory of productivity over the course of a researcher's lifetime has been studied for at least 60 years, with the common observation being that a researcher's productivity rises rapidly to a peak and then slowly declines [5][6][7][8][9], which has inspired the construction of mechanistic models with a similar profile [7,[9][10][11][12]. These models have included factors like cognitive decline with age, career age, finite supplies of human capital, knowledge advantages conferred by recent education, as well as skill deficits among the young, among others, and have been supported by the observation that individual productivity curves feature both long-and medium-term fluctuations [12] and are not well described by even fourth-degree polynomial models [9]. Indeed, every study we found to date proposes or confirms a * samuel.way@colorado.edu † allison.morg...

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