John Robert Warren
Sociological Science, February 27, 2019
10.15195/v6.a7
Abstract
Many sociologists suspect that publication expectations have risen over time—that how much graduate students have published to get assistant professor jobs and how much assistant professors have published to be promoted have gone up. Using information about faculty in 21 top sociology departments from the American Sociological Association’s Guide to Graduate Departments of Sociology, online curricula vitae, and other public records, I provide empirical evidence to support this suspicion. On the day they start their first jobs, new assistant professors in recent years have already published roughly twice as much as their counterparts did in the early 1990s. Trends for promotion to associate professor are not as dramatic but are still remarkable. I evaluate several potential explanations for these trends and conclude that they are driven mainly by changes over time in the fiscal and organizational realities of universities and departments.
Many sociologists suspect that publication expectations have risen over time—that how much graduate students have published to get assistant professor jobs and how much assistant professors have published to be promoted have gone up. Using information about faculty in 21 top sociology departments from the American Sociological Association’s Guide to Graduate Departments of Sociology, online curricula vitae, and other public records, I provide empirical evidence to support this suspicion. On the day they start their first jobs, new assistant professors in recent years have already published roughly twice as much as their counterparts did in the early 1990s. Trends for promotion to associate professor are not as dramatic but are still remarkable. I evaluate several potential explanations for these trends and conclude that they are driven mainly by changes over time in the fiscal and organizational realities of universities and departments.
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- Citation: Warren, John Robert. 2019. “How Much Do You Have to Publish to Get a Job in a Top Sociology Department? Or to Get Tenure? Trends over a Generation.” Sociological Science 6:172-196.
- Received: December 10, 2018
- Accepted: January 10, 2018
- Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
- DOI: 10.15195/v6.a7
In the field of Art History, publications don’t count that much. A certain professor’s students always get TT jobs at research universities (R-1).
Another good publication on this topic is
Bauldry, S. (2013) “Trends in the Research Productivity of Newly Hired Assistant Professors at Research Departments from 2007 to 2012.” The American Sociologist 44: 282. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-013-9187-4
Bauldry looks at the top 98 departments over a shorter period and finds similar trends.
From the author:
Thank you to the readers who have emailed or otherwise communicated with me to point out errors in my data. In particular, I offer thanks to Shamus Khan for noting that my data on Associate Professors at Columbia are way off!
As I wrote in the article, I intend to collect identified errors in the data, fix them, re-run the analyses, and re-post the data and tables/figures on my web site (https://www.rob-warren.com/pub_trends.html) an ongoing basis. Also, Sociological Science may, at their discretion, post an errata page.
I am firmly committed to making my data and code freely available. I am also in the unusual position of having my audience and my research subjects be the same people. This means that — unlike almost any other social science study I can think of — the research subjects themselves can (and are motivated to) identify errors in the data. At this point, I see no evidence that the identified errors substantially affect my main findings. Nonetheless, it is important to get it right!
Rob
Rob: I have doubts about the analysis. From the data set, I see that you have used full counts, but I would suggest that fractional counting should be employed especially when you are looking for trends over time. So, a possible explanation is that sociologists just as other scientists are collaborating more to produce papers, the papers become more frequent but each author does not produce more than before (a function of the growing number of authors).