If you’re a postdoc who wants to nail down that permanent faculty position, it’s wise to publish a highly cited paper after your PhD. That’s the conclusion of a study by an international team of researchers, which finds that publication rates and performance during the postdoc period is key to academic retention and early-career success. Their analysis also reveals that more than four in 10 postdocs drop out of academia.
A postdoc is usually a temporary appointment that is seen as preparation for an academic career. Many researchers, however, end up doing several postdocs in a row as they hunt for a permanent faculty job. “There are many more postdocs than there are faculty positions, so it is a kind of systemic bottleneck,” says Petter Holme, a computer scientist at Aalto University in Finland, who led the study.
Previous research into academic career success has tended to overlook the role of a postdoc, focusing instead on, say, the impact of where researchers did their PhD. To eke out the effect of a postdoc, Holme and colleagues combined information of academics’ career stages from LinkedIn with their publication history obtained from Microsoft Academic Graph. The resulting global dataset covered 45, 572 careers spanning 25 years across all academic disciplines.
Overall, they found, 41% of postdocs left academia. But researchers who publish a highly cited paper as a postdoc are much more likely to pursue a faculty career – whether they published a highly cited paper during their PhD degree, or not. Publication rate is also vital, with researchers who publish less as postdocs compared to their PhD days being more likely to drop out of academia. Conversely, as productivity increased, so did the likelihood of a postdoc gaining a faculty position.
Expanding horizons
Holme says their results suggest that a researcher only has a few years “to get on the positive feedback loop, where one success leads to another”. In fact, the team found that a “moderate” change in research topic when moving from PhD to postdoc could improve future success. “It is a good thing to change your research focus, but not too much,” says Holme because it widens perspective without having to learn an entire new research topic from scratch.
Likewise, shifting perspective by moving abroad can also benefit postdocs. The analysis shows that a researcher moving abroad for a postdoc boosts their citations, but a move to a different institution in the same country has a negligible impact.
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