Tenure disrupts research, publishing patterns – Study

Academics’ research-publication patterns shift fundamentally after they attain tenure, a coveted status that provides job security in the United States, according to an analysis of more than 12,000 researchers across 15 disciplines, reports Max Kozlov for Nature.

Faculty members in all disciplines tend to publish the most in the year before they’re granted tenure, the analysis found. After achieving it, their output varies by field: it plateaus for biologists and others who tend to work in the laboratory, and dips for those in fields such as mathematics that generally do not require lab research. The analysis was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Tenure is perhaps the most crucial decision in science,” says co-author Dashun Wang, a computational social scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Full report on the Nature site