An exploratory full-text analysis of Science Careers in a changing academic job market

Abstract

Science is one of the top interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals with a very wide audience, and since 1996 it has dedicated a section of its website, Science Careers, to career news and advice. As Science Careers has been active, the academic job market has been transforming, most notably by a decrease in the availability of tenure-track academic positions. Using a dataset of 6111 full-text Science Careers articles we perform an exploratory text analysis to characterize the changes in framing, topics, and scope of career content. We analyzed tag frequency and word frequency to examine topics over time. We tracked the relative prominence of articles that explicitly present advice to the reader, as opposed to more descriptive articles about workforce dynamics or personal experiences of career scientists. We find that although the number of articles tagged Advice had remained consistently high from the inception of the Science Careers section, 2015 marked the beginning of a significant decrease in the number of explicitly tagged Advice articles. The apparent disinclination for strongly prescriptive advice may indicate a growing sense, even within an academic-oriented venue, that career-pathways for researchers have become less predictable, making dispensing broadly applicable advice more challenging.