Does A Professor’s Scholarly Productivity Decline With Age?

Paul Caron:

Despite the persistent conventional narrative and expectations about productivity, individual people have incredibly diverse careers,” s
aid Samuel Way, a postdoctoral research associate in computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the paper’s lead author. “This is a cautionary tale to administrators and other people in power in the sciences as to why they shouldn’t expect everyone’s career trajectory to look the exact same way.”

The majority of academics who don’t fit the mold “aren’t errors, they’re people,” he added.

Way said the finding has implications for hiring and funding decisions and tenure and retirement policies. If only a fraction of academics — approximately 20 percent in the study — peak in productivity early in their careers, faculty search committees might do well to look beyond younger, prolific candidates, for example. Institutions, meanwhile, might worry less about older professors delaying retirement. …