“Once Highly Productive, Always Highly Productive”? Research Productivity from a Life-Cycle Perspective

To what extent productivity changes over a life-course of academics: what productivity classes current full professors belonged to – when they were assistant and associate professors? Large cohorts of academics are traced over their careers lasting 20-30 years and allocated to retrospectively constructed productivity classes. The power of (structured) Big Data in quantifying academic careers will be shown. Traditional “rapid rise, traditional decline” productivity trajectories will be examined based on individual observations from a whole national system (Poland). The results will be briefly confronted with traditional theories of productivity in which age matters. “The Laboratory of Polish Science” data set with full biographical, administrative, and bibliometric metadata of 100,000 scientists (and their 400,000 publications) is used. The theme of Big Data in academic career research will be discussed and tensions between this national-level study and an ongoing global study (4.1 million scientists from the OECD area) will be explored. Cross-disciplinary and sex differences in transitions between productivity classes (top, middle, and bottom) over a life-course of academics will be explored, with implications for hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions.