Inside the Academic Job Market, Part 3: The Role of Publications

Many personality and social psychology graduate students strive to secure an academic job. However, finding, applying, and successfully acquiring an academic job is an elaborate process. To promote transparency in this process, the SPSP student committee launched a survey and collected data from individuals who were recently (or are currently) on the job market (N = 305). See the September and October newsletters for demographic information of the sample and descriptive statistics on job outcomes and their correlates. 

In this month’s article, we focus on how a candidate’s publications relate to job outcomes. Graduate students are encouraged to publish and disseminate their research. Quality and the quantity of publications are thought to be indicative of one’s research expertise. But to what extent do publications influence academic job outcomes?

We start by describing how many publications people have across different rounds of being on the job market. As explained in an earlier newsletter, people often stay on the job market for several rounds. The table below conveys the number of publications people had across different rounds of being on the job market.

Two important trends are worth noting. First, as one would expect, the longer you stay on the job market, the more time you have to publish. Therefore, people who are on the job market longer tend to have more publications. Second, the standard deviations for these results are considerably high, meaning that there is a lot of variation around this mean.

Given there is much variance among the profiles of individuals on the job market, next we report on the profiles of those who received a post-doctorate offer and those who received a tenure-track offer (collapsed across different rounds on the job market).

Another important consideration is institution type. Different institution types may hire candidates with different profiles. Next, we report on how many total publications people had when they received their first assistant professor offer, broken down by institution type.

Looking at this table, there seems to be a distinction between the number of total publications and receiving an offer from different types of institutions. However, these results are correlational. Perhaps those who were more motivated to publish during their graduate and post-doctoral studies may have applied to different types of institutions.

Lastly, most wonder about the question of quality vs quantity. Is it better to have more publications or does the impact factor of the journal matter more? Specifically, what is the relative importance of the total number of publications vs. the impact of the journal in determining whether someone got an offer? Results from a multiple regression analysis suggest that when controlling for the total number of publications, the type of journal only seems to influence obtaining a tenure offer (p = .004), but not any other type of offer (post-doc offer, research offer, teaching offer, adjunct offer).

Overall then, do publications influence securing an academic position? Maybe. Importantly, different profiles may be important for different types of positions (e.g., research position vs lecturer). It is also noteworthy that these results are cross-sectional and therefore, we are not able to establish causality. Further, these results were collected using self-report data, which may have been subject to different biases. Finally, it is plausible, and likely, that many other factors influence academic job outcomes, beyond those discussed in this newsletter series. Nonetheless, these results help illustrate the current correlates of obtaining an academic position.

Stay tuned for the next month’s newsletter article which will feature the technical report of the job market survey.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Heidi Anahi Vuletich and Fernanda Chardulo Diad De Andrade for their contributions to this article.