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How Much Do You Have to Publish to Get a Job in a Top Sociology Department? Or to Get Tenure? Trends over a Generation

By on February 27, 2019 in Articles

John Robert Warren

Sociological Science, February 27, 2019
10.15195/v6.a7

Abstract
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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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

John Robert Warren: Department of Sociology, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota
E-mail: warre046@umn.edu

Acknowledgements: This article was prepared for presentation at the Sociology Department Workshop at the University of Minnesota, whose College of Liberal Arts’ Dean’s Freshman Research and Creative Scholars program provided support for this project. Support has also come from the Minnesota Population Center, which receives core funding (P2C HD041023) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. I sincerely thank graduate research assistant Chris Levesque; undergraduate interns Harold Carpenter, Kristina Mann, Charles Massie, Zixiong Peng, and Morgan Schmitt-Morris; and undergraduate research assistants Megan Bursch, James Crim, Julina Duan, Alejandra Narvaez, Shannyn Telander, and Nathan Torunsky for their hard and careful work on this research. I am also very grateful to my colleagues Jack DeWaard, Doug Hartmann, Jonas Helgertz, Jennifer C. Lee, Chandra Muller, Gina Rumore, and Barbara Schneider for providing helpful comments and suggestions. However, errors and omissions are my responsibility. Please direct correspondence to me at warre046@umn.edu.

  • 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


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