TY - JOUR
AU - Yueran Duan
AU - Shahan Ali Memon
AU - Bedoor AlShebli
AU - Qing Guan
AU - Petter Holme
AU - Talal Rahwan
AB - Postdoctoral training is a career stage often described as a demanding and anxiety-laden time when many promising PhDs see their academic dreams slip away due to circumstances beyond their control. We use a unique dataset of academic publishing and careers to chart the more or less successful postdoctoral paths. We build a measure of academic success on the citation patterns two to five years into a faculty career. Then, we monitor how students’ postdoc positions—in terms of relocation, change of topic, and early well-cited papers—relate to their early-career success. One key finding is that the postdoc period seems more important than the doctoral training to achieve this form of success. This is especially interesting in light of the many studies of academic faculty hiring that link Ph.D. granting institutions and hires, omitting the postdoc stage. Another group of findings can be summarized as a Goldilocks principle: It seems beneficial to change one’s direction, but not too much.
BT - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DA - 2025-01-28
DO - 10.1073/pnas.2402053122
IS - 4
N2 - Postdoctoral training is a career stage often described as a demanding and anxiety-laden time when many promising PhDs see their academic dreams slip away due to circumstances beyond their control. We use a unique dataset of academic publishing and careers to chart the more or less successful postdoctoral paths. We build a measure of academic success on the citation patterns two to five years into a faculty career. Then, we monitor how students’ postdoc positions—in terms of relocation, change of topic, and early well-cited papers—relate to their early-career success. One key finding is that the postdoc period seems more important than the doctoral training to achieve this form of success. This is especially interesting in light of the many studies of academic faculty hiring that link Ph.D. granting institutions and hires, omitting the postdoc stage. Another group of findings can be summarized as a Goldilocks principle: It seems beneficial to change one’s direction, but not too much.
PY - 2025
EP - e2402053122
T2 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
TI - Postdoc publications and citations link to academic retention and faculty success
UR - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2402053122
VL - 122
Y2 - 2025-08-22
ER -