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About this paper
Giorgio Tripodi, Xiang Zheng, Yifan Qian, Dakota Murray, Benjamin F. Jones, Chaoqun Ni, Dashun Wang
This study comprehensively analyzes how academic tenure influences faculty research across diverse U.S. disciplines, integrating seven large datasets to uncover distinct shifts in productivity, impact, and novelty. It finds that tenure acts as a critical career inflection point, driving intense pre-tenure output and impact, followed by discipline-specific productivity patterns and a general shift towards more novel, exploratory research post-tenure.
Key insights
- Academic tenure serves as a powerful inflection point, causing sharp, rather than smooth, shifts in research trajectories that fundamentally alter how career milestones shape scientific productivity.
- The post-tenure research trajectory is not uniform but is strongly mediated by disciplinary organizational structures, distinguishing between 'rise-and-stabilize' patterns in lab-based fields and 'rise-and-fall' in non-lab-based fields.
- Job security provided by tenure facilitates a shift towards more novel and exploratory research, even if this work initially demonstrates less immediate impact compared to pre-tenure output.
Summary by alphaXiv.
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