A researcher may publish tens or hundreds of papers, yet these contributions to the literature are not uniformly distributed over a career. Past analyses of the trajectories of faculty productivity suggest an intuitive and canonical pattern: after being hired, 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 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 describes only one third of faculty, regardless of department prestige, and the remaining two thirds of faculty exhibit a rich diversity of productivity patterns. To explain this diversity, we introduce a simple model of productivity trajectories, and explore which factors correlate with its parameters, showing that both individual productivity and the transition from first- to last-author publications correlate with departmental prestige.
['Samuel F. Way', 'Allison C. Morgan', 'Aaron Clauset', 'Daniel B. Larremore']
The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory