Postdoc publications ‘more important for career than PhD success’ – Times Higher Education

Resources for
academics and university staff
Everything you need for each step
of your study abroad journey
Publishing a well-cited paper as a postdoc significantly increases one’s chances of staying in academia but the same effect is not seen for PhD students, a new longitudinal study suggests.
In the paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 20 January, researchers analyse the careers of more than 45,500 postdoctoral researchers from multiple disciplines and countries over a 25-year period to establish if there is a link between having highly cited “hit papers” and career success in academia.
Overall, 41 per cent of postdocs left academia – a dropout rate that represented a “systemic bottleneck that is unrelated to the qualifications of the individuals involved” as “many postdocs are, by design, destined to leave academia”, explains the study by researchers from the US, China, Finland, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.
However, that attrition rate fell significantly if a postdoc scored a “hit paper” – one which finds itself in the top 5 per cent of its field’s year-end citation list, the study explains. Those postdocs who scored a hit paper – and had not already had one as a PhD student – were 7 percentage points more likely to stay in academia than those without a hit paper; 66 per cent of these researchers stayed in academia.
Tips for success in academic publishing
For postdocs who already had a hit paper as a PhD, the gap was 8 percentage points, with 67 per cent staying in academia versus 59 per cent without a hit paper as a postdoc.
Having a hit paper as a PhD, however, made no difference on average to career success, with 59 per cent of those with or without a PhD hit-paper staying in academia – a finding that indicates the “postdoc period seems more important than the doctoral training to achieve this form of success”.
According to the authors, this was “especially interesting in light of the many studies of academic faculty hiring that link PhD granting institutions and hires”, which has found, for instance, that more than a third of full US professors at top US universities gained their doctorate from just five elite US institutions.
Drawing attention to the “remarkably hierarchical” nature of academic hiring in which “new faculty hires are likely to have a PhD from an institution higher in the hierarchy…[but] for postdocs, the flow is reversed”, the paper “calls for models of the academic job market that give postdoctoral training its deserved attention”.
“Our findings should also encourage PhDs to take a moderate step out of their immediate academic surroundings for their postdoc,” it advises, noting too that moving abroad for a postdoc increased one’s chances of staying within academia.
jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com
Why register?
Or subscribe for unlimited access to:
Already registered or a current subscriber? Login
At a time of increasing financial constraint, jobs are being shed even in UK departments that ride high in the Research Excellence Framework, while time allocations for research are being cut. Can a loss-making activity like research survive outside traditional institutions, asks Jack Grove 
What other industry would deem those with so much prior training to still be mere trainees? Let’s call them what they are – researchers, says Michele Nardin
Payment of almost £5,000 would enable doctoral graduates to refocus on the job market and avoid burnout, says Hepi-British Academy report
Provocative paper claims boycott of feminist title left early career scholars high and dry while others profited from ‘moral entrepreneurship’
Domestic doctoral enrolments have shrunk by 8 per cent over the last half-decade, says report
María Zambrano programme was designed to attract international talent – but many recipients say no effort has been made to retain them
Support for 150 ‘venture science doctorates’ by 2029 aims to increase number of spin-outs developed by early career researchers in Germany
Subscribe to Times Higher Education
As the voice of global higher education, THE is an invaluable daily resource. Subscribe today to receive unlimited news and analyses, commentary from the sharpest minds in international academia, our influential university rankings analysis and the latest insights from our World Summit series.

source

About The Author

admin

See author's posts