Crystal ball or moneyball: does publishing success during graduate school predict career publication productivity?

Abstract

In academic departments, arguably the most important decisions that faculty will face collectively will be the hiring of a new colleague. Questions often emerge, however, concerning how to predict whether an applicant will have a successful career in terms of publishing productivity. Some methods of prediction are clinical (what we term the ‘crystal ball’ method), which involve the weighing of several pieces of information with no set decision rules. Other methods are more actuarial (what we term the ‘Moneyball’ method) and rely heavily on an applicant's publication record while in graduate school. To examine the degree to which publication productivity in graduate school predicts publishing success over the course of one's career, we gathered detailed data from the curriculum vitae of 407 faculty residing in institutions affiliated with the Association of Doctoral Programs in Criminology and Criminal Justice. We also identified four faculty ‘outliers’ to target for qualitative interviews to provide additional nuance and context to our statistical models. Analyses of these vitae indicate that pre-degree publication productivity – measured in multiple ways – significantly predicted career publishing success. Nevertheless, the magnitude of this relationship varied across models and the implications for search committees and hiring decisions are discussed.