Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment

Abstract

Faculty at prestigious institutions produce more scientific papers, receive more citations and scholarly awards, and are typically trained at more-prestigious institutions than faculty with less prestigious appointments. This imbalance is often attributed to a meritocratic system that sorts individuals into more-prestigious positions according to their reputation, past achievements, and potential for future scholarly impact. Here, we investigate the determinants of scholarly productivity and measure their dependence on past training and current work environments. To distinguish the effects of these environments, we apply a matched-pairs experimental design to career and productivity trajectories of 2,453 early-career faculty at all 205 PhD-granting computer science departments in the United States and Canada, who together account for over 200,000 publications and 7.4 million citations. Our results show that the prestige of faculty's current work environment, not their training environment, drives their future scientific productivity, while current and past locations drive prominence. Furthermore, the characteristics of a work environment are more predictive of faculty productivity and impact than mechanisms representing preferential selection or retention of more-productive scholars by more-prestigious departments. These results identify an environmental mechanism for cumulative advantage, in which an individual's past successes are "locked in" via placement into a more prestigious environment, which directly facilitates future success. The scientific productivity of early-career faculty is thus driven by where they work, rather than where they trained for their doctorate, indicating a limited role for doctoral prestige in predicting scientific contributions.

Keywords: environmental effects; prestige; scholarly productivity; science careers; science of science.

Fig. 1.

Institutional prestige predicts early-career productivity and prominence of computer science faculty. Shown are median publication (left axis) and ${\log }_{10}$ citation (right axis) counts per faculty per institution (minimum three faculty per institution), accumulated through their first 10 years posthire, adjusted for growth in publication rates over time (SI Appendix, section A). Shaded regions denote 95% confidence intervals for least squares regression.

Fig. 2.

Early-career productivity is driven by work environment prestige. For pairs of computer science faculty matched by (A and B) work environment prestige or (C and D) training environment prestige, (A) publication and (B) citation counts are statistically independent of differences in doctoral prestige but are driven higher by (C and D) placing into a more prestigious work environment. Shaded regions denote 95% confidence intervals for the mean. Similar results are obtained using U.S. News & World Report department rankings in place of prestige (see SI Appendix, Fig. S1).

Fig. 3.

Binned by departmental prestige, early-career faculty leave their initial appointments, either for other institutions or for a nonacademic job, at similar rates. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals around the means. Dotted magenta line indicates the total fraction of departed faculty from all 205 institutions (0.281).

Fig. 4.

Departmental attributes correlate with productivity measures, suggesting possible mechanisms. The heatmap summarizes the results of 20 regression analyses, describing the relationships between 19 departmental attributes (rows) and 10 measures of productivity across the department’s individual faculty (columns). Each cell depicts the strength of the corresponding standardized regression coefficient, if significant, under two models. Model 1 (top wedge) includes prestige and private covariates, which are omitted in model 2 (bottom wedge).