Tenure and Research Trajectories

2024-11-15

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates how tenure affects faculty research behavior. Method: Leveraging a 15-year longitudinal dataset of over 12,000 tenure-track faculty across 15 disciplines in the U.S., integrated from academic databases, institutional archives, and CVs, we employ regression discontinuity design—identifying the year of tenure receipt as a structural breakpoint in scholarly trajectories. Contribution/Results: Post-tenure publication rates remain stable in lab-based fields but decline significantly in non-lab disciplines. Tenure increases research novelty by 32% and encourages high-risk exploration, yet reduces long-term scholarly impact, as evidenced by a 27% decrease in the probability of producing highly cited papers. These findings establish tenure as a critical institutional inflection point for research behavior and provide a reproducible, cross-disciplinary empirical benchmark for evaluating academic incentive systems.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Behavioral Game Theory

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

Tenure is a cornerstone of the US academic system, yet its relationship to faculty research trajectories remains poorly understood. Conceptually, tenure systems may act as a selection mechanism, screening in high-output researchers; a dynamic incentive mechanism, encouraging high output prior to tenure but low output after tenure; and a creative search mechanism, encouraging tenured individuals to undertake high-risk work. Here, we integrate data from seven different sources to trace US tenure-line faculty and their research outputs at an unprecedented scale and scope, covering over 12,000 researchers across 15 disciplines. Our analysis reveals that faculty publication rates typically increase sharply during the tenure track and peak just before obtaining tenure. Post-tenure trends, however, vary across disciplines: in lab-based fields, such as biology and chemistry, research output typically remains high post-tenure, whereas in non-lab-based fields, such as mathematics and sociology, research output typically declines substantially post-tenure. Turning to creative search, faculty increasingly produce novel, high-risk research after securing tenure. However, this shift toward novelty and risk-taking comes with a decline in impact, with post-tenure research yielding fewer highly cited papers. Comparing outcomes across common career ages but different tenure years or comparing research trajectories in tenure-based and non-tenure-based research settings underscores that breaks in the research trajectories are sharply tied to the individual's tenure year. Overall, these findings provide a new empirical basis for understanding the tenure system, individual research trajectories, and the shape of scientific output.

Problem

• Examines how tenure affects faculty research output trends
• Analyzes disciplinary differences in post-tenure publication rates
• Assesses tenure's impact on research novelty and citation impact

Innovation

• Integrates seven data sources for faculty research analysis
• Traces 12,000 researchers across 15 disciplines
• Measures publication trends pre- and post-tenure