Postdoc publications ‘more important for career than PhD success’

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