Research productivity typically peaks during the year before tenure, researchers found.
It’s well-known that professors across all disciplines are under pressure to publish if they want to get tenure. But what’s been less known is how achieving tenure—and the job security that comes with it—influences publication patterns, such as volume, impact and research novelty.
To find out more, researchers at Northwestern University, Northeastern University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison analyzed the careers of 12,000 U.S.-based faculty across 15 disciplines, including business, sociology and chemistry. They evaluated publication outcomes over an 11-year span, which includes the five years before and after those scholars got tenure. Last week, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America published the results of that analysis in a peer-reviewed paper, “Tenure and Research Trajectories.”
“If a researcher has a lifelong labor contract and there are no more tests, you may expect that they could reduce their effort and get lazy,” said Dashun Wang, a co-author of the paper and business professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “But when we looked at the data, those cases were extremely rare.”
Across all disciplines, average publication rates rose at a sharp, steady pace for researchers on the tenure track, typically reaching a peak during the year before tenure. After tenure, the average publication rate stabilizes right around the pretenure peak.
That finding suggests that though getting tenure may reduce incentives to publish as frequently—or at all—the “moral hazard considerations of tenure may be offset or overcome by a ‘screening’ function of tenure,” according to the paper. “Here, the tenure process can be thought of as a difficult test that identifies individuals who, regardless of incentives, are willing and able to maintain high levels of research success throughout their careers.”
However, post-tenure publication rates varied by discipline. Researchers in fields that involve lab research, such as physics, engineering and computer science, had stable research output after they got tenure. In contrast, non-lab researchers in fields such as economics, mathematics and political science had declining research output after they got tenure.
Wang said that one hypothesis for that distinction is that lab-based researchers are more reliant on competitive external grants to carry out their work because “getting a grant is indicative of a researcher’s past and future productivity, ability to come up with great ideas and leadership skills.”
The type of research scholars produce also changes before and after tenure.
Pretenure researchers produced more “hit papers,” or those that were in the top 5 percent of the distribution of citations across all papers in the same publication year and subfield. But the study also shows that tenure encourages exploration of novel ideas. Post-tenure, scholars across disciplines were more likely than their tenure-track colleagues to explore research topics that are both new to their research agendas and their respective fields.
“These results indicate that in the post-tenure period, faculty tend to undertake agendas that are both new to them and relatively novel in science, a potentially riskier behavior that extends the reach of science as a whole but produces fewer hits,” the study said.
Wang said that while he and his co-authors aren’t trying to make a judgment on the efficacy of the tenure system, “we are hoping to provide systematic data to inform those discussions.”
