The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory
▻http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/10/16/1702121114.abstract
We show that the conventional narrative confidently describes only one-fifth of faculty, regardless of department prestige or researcher gender, and the remaining four-fifths of faculty exhibit a rich diversity of productivity patterns. (…) These results demonstrate the unpredictability of productivity over time and open the door for new efforts to understand how environmental and individual factors shape scientific productivity.