How many publications to be a professor

Skip to content Home Research Paper How many publications do you need to be a professor? Research Paper. Ben Davis June 1, How many publications do you need to be a professor? How hard is it to get a faculty position? Is it hard to get tenure? Is going into academia worth it? Can you be a professor without a PHD? What do you call a professor without a PhD?

What is the highest academic title? How does a professor get tenure? I tweet about psychology, neuroscience, and statistics diegoareinero.

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A hub for behavioural and social sciences authors and editors at Nature Portfolio, and all other interested researchers. A community from Nature Research. Contributor Nature Nature Human Behaviour. Is it publish or perish?

Diego A. Published Oct 23, Like Comment. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn. Copy the link. This table presents the data — statistics are medians with standard deviations in parentheses — from assistant professor hires in psychology from top-ranked research universities R1s and small liberal art colleges SLACs. R1s were chosen based on their graduate psychology program being ranked in the top by U. SLACs were chosen based on the college being ranked in the top by U.

As I recorded all information manually, via CVs or online profiles e. Since I did not have access to the job applications of these now-professors, all stats e. To be conservative, publications do not include conference proceedings i. Image by pasja from Pixabay The good news is that there are many types of academic jobs to consider.

Mentorship Matters Whether you need 2 or 20 publications, the pressure to publish places a premium on finding supportive advisors at well-networked institutions who can steer your research in productive ways and navigate peer-review. In a survey of mostly life science job market applicants, many respondents indicated that poor mentorship was a hinderance in their faculty applications.

Footnotes: 1 Gaining entrance to a PhD program is a feat itself. References: Boysen, G. You may also be interested in What institutional reforms will make science more efficient and reliable? Contributor Nature Human Behaviour. Behind the Paper , Is it publish or perish? Leo Tiokhin. More gender equality in authorship Contributor.

News and Opinion , Is it publish or perish? Benno Torgler. Our Community Vision Realized Editor. From the Editors , Is it publish or perish? Jenn Richler. Thanks for the info. The cause and effect can be the other way around, i. There could be hidden variables, i. The field of scientometrics may have more insights to add here. Cal, have you decoded the formula for visibility in academia, more specifically, what do you think are the factors that make a blockbuster paper?

The question is, how do you get highly cited papers in any field. Unfortunately, this can lead science down very dangerous paths. Possible ways of getting lots of citations:. What we should really be asking, is how can we ensure that as many scientists as possible hit criterion i. If you can do that, you are guaranteed tenure, and scientific progress will be all the better for it. She got numbers. This might be one starting point. This is definitely possible. Good question.

My main criteria was speed with which they obtained tenure and then full professorship after that , combined with some standard distinctions in my field. Higher citation accounts seem to require either: a a substantial advancement in an established direction; or b a new direction that has obvious importance. These are both much harder than simply working backwards from what you already know what to do — a default behavior I find to be dangerously alluring.

The hard citation metric protects you from this trap. I would describe my writing mission as trying to figure out how to succeed more in my professional mission! Frans Johansson, in his new book which is where I heard about this study , attributes this finding to the need to make lots of bets to figure out what will work. I tend to agree. Not to be harsh, but when I hear people complain that writing successful papers requires shifty shortcuts, it sounds to me like sour grapes.

In my experience, it really boils down to hard work. To make an impact, first of all, you have to really understand what the best people in your field are doing. This is really hard. Then you have to work on lots of projects in parallel, continually trying to mix and match your collections of hard problems and promising techniques. For a lot of star scientists, there is an inflection point where their toolbox of techniques, and knowledge of the field, is large enough that they suddenly start making lots of breakthroughs.

I think this answer still misses the point that the question raised. Simply that it has inherent pitfalls that can lead to many citations of derivative work or networking skills etc. Kudos to you for keeping a steady blog post rate while being a new dad. Your fixed-schedule must come in very handy these days! Perhaps not in your field, but in many others, one way to get cited a lot is to write a survey of all the work in the field. More and more journals are counting the number of times an article is accessed on line.

This number might be useful as it would respond much quicker than citations. I would hardly qualify it as ground-breaking. Cal, I think it may be as you say, especially in computer science or mathematics, where you have rigorous standards for what works and what does not. But in plenty of other fields economics, psychology… , standards are not that objective, so there the dangers that DKS mentioned are very real.

Remember behaviorism and Freudian psychology? This could also be relevant. Great post. I want to be systematic about how I attack problems in the lab. Could you elaborate more on the notebooks you kept with successful strategies?

Perhaps even post a sample in a future post? The point about overall productivity predicting the big wins is more interesting and contradicts a lot of fashionable grumpiness about how professors should strive to publish fewer, better papers.

Has anyone had first year professors? I struggled and was doing well at an A for the final. She changes them all up. This final was super detailed and I did not expect this. How do you prepare for new professors and prepare for the unexpected?

I feel like I always am unprepared for things on my tests. Do you just make sure you understand everything said in lecture? I think Cal gives some brutally honest and very helpful career advice. The problem is to have those highly cited papers, you cannot predict which one will be highly cited, thus more is better than less, usually.

Unfortunately or fortunately , this is still not enough. Personally, I prefer people who publish less, but can prove that those few papers matter. That is super-impressive! However, doing a Google Scholar search with your name does not return any journal articles although it does show all of your books. It would be very insightful to see the type of articles that prolific researchers like yourself publish. Thanks in advance. Your email address will not be published. I'm a computer science professor who writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture.

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This was on my mind when, earlier this week, I went seeking empirical insight into the above prompt, and ended up designing a simple experiment: I started by identifying well-known professors in my particular niche of theoretical computer science.