ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Observational
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- Intelligent regulation of university faculty interdisciplinary collaboration networks based on complex network topology evolution and stochastic differential equations.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The effect of trainee career intentions on mentor's interest in the trainee: Experimental evidence from academia.Research policy · 2025Article
- Supervisors' Academic Supervising Behaviors and Graduate Students' Academic Thriving: The Mediating Roles of Admiration and Task Engagement.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Academic mentees thrive in big groups, but survive in small groups.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Validation of a Scientific Authority Questionnaire for Faculty Members in Medical Science Universities: A Cross-Sectional Study in Iran.Health science reports · 2025Article
- Postdoc publications and citations link to academic retention and faculty success.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Impact of Financial Incentives and Department Size on Scholarly Activity Output.Annals of family medicine · 2025Article
- Article
- Network assortativity for a multidimensional evaluation of socio-economic territorial biases in university rankings.PloS one · 2025Article
- Citation bias, diversity, and ethics.Accountability in research · 2024Article
- Evaluation of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00) Program.Journal of cancer education : the official journal of the American Association for Cancer Education · 2024Article
- Article
- Analysis of NIH K99/R00 Awards and the Career Progression of Awardees.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty.Science advances · 2023Article
- Equitable hiring strategies towards a diversified faculty.Nature biomedical engineering · 2023Article
- Data, measurement and empirical methods in the science of science.Nature human behaviour · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.