Securing a tenured position is linked with a decline in paper output in some academic fields.Credit: Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News/Getty
Academics’ research-publication patterns shift fundamentally after they attain tenure, a coveted status that provides job security in the United States, according to an analysis1 of more than 12,000 researchers across 15 disciplines.
Faculty members in all disciplines tend to publish the most in the year before they’re granted tenure, the analysis found. After achieving it, their output varies by field: it plateaus for biologists and others who tend to work in the laboratory, and dips for those in fields such as mathematics that generally do not require lab research. The analysis was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Tenure is perhaps the most crucial decision in science,” says co-author Dashun Wang, a computational social scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He adds that the results show that the research that faculty members take on after receiving tenure is riskier that what they do before tenure, but their post-tenure output yields fewer highly cited papers.
The ultimate academic prize
Tenure is prized among scholars for its promise of job security and research freedom in academia. After attaining tenure, a scientist’s position can be terminated only under extreme circumstances. Most academics serve a fixed probationary period — the ‘tenure track’ — followed by a pivotal decision that either locks in the job or dashes hopes of secure employment.
Wang’s team predicted that there might be an uptick in scholarly output in the year before the decision, owing to the immense pressure that researchers face to publish many papers and to publish in prestigious journals.
Is it time for tenure to evolve?
To find out, the authors analysed seven data sources, including an annual compilation of US universities’ employment records for both tenured and tenure-track faculty members, which allowed them to track job titles from year to year. Whenever a researcher’s title changed from ‘assistant professor’ to ‘associate professor’, a common indicator that they had attained tenure, Wang’s team designated that event as occurring within one year after tenure.
From there, the authors used data from several databases to link the researchers’ names with their publication record. This allowed the team to determine faculty members’ publication rates during the five years before and five years after they were granted tenure.
Averaged across all disciplines, in the fifth year before receiving tenure, researchers published 2 papers, compared with nearly 3.5 in the year before tenure and in the years after tenure.
Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says this analysis shows why so many researchers “feel completely burnt out by the time they get to tenure”. A focus on metrics, such as number of publications or citation count, doesn’t emphasize quality, innovation or longer projects, she adds. “There’s a great deal of pressure on junior academics to do as much research as possible, to prove you deserve to keep that job.”
