The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory
The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1702121114
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发表时间：
2017-10-01
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Larremore, Daniel B.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Way, Samuel F.;Morgan, Allison C.;Larremore, Daniel B.
一个科学家可能在其职业生涯中发表数十篇或数百篇论文，但这些贡献在时间上并不均匀。60年来对各个领域职业生产力模式的研究表明了一个直观而普遍的模式：生产力往往会迅速上升到早期的峰值，然后逐渐下降。在这里，我们通过分析单个教师生产力时间序列的结构来测试这种传统叙述的普遍性，这些结构是从超过20万份出版物中构建的，并与美国和加拿大所有205个授予博士学位的计算机科学系的2，453名终身教职教师的招聘数据相匹配。与以前的研究不同，这些研究只考虑了一些教师或一些机构，或者缺乏共同的职业参考点，在这里，我们将联合收割机与涵盖整个研究领域的职业转变的综合信息相结合。我们发现，传统的叙事自信地描述只有五分之一的教师，无论部门的声望或研究人员的性别，和教师的其余五分之四表现出丰富多样的生产力模式。为了解释这种多样性，我们引入了一个简单的生产力轨迹模型，并探讨其参数和研究人员协变量之间的相关性，表明部门声望预测整体个人生产力和从第一作者到最后作者出版物的过渡时间。这些结果表明，随着时间的推移，生产力的不可预测性，并打开大门，新的努力，了解环境和个人因素如何塑造科学生产力。
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 2,453 tenure-track faculty in all 205 PhD-granting computer science departments in the United States 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.