Abstract
Measuring and predicting the success of junior faculty is of considerable interest to faculty, academic institutions, funding agencies and faculty development and mentoring programs. Various metrics have been proposed to evaluate and predict research success and impact, such as the h-index, and modifications of this index, but they have not been evaluated and validated side-by-side in a rigorous empirical study. Our study provides a retrospective analysis of how well bibliographic metrics and formulas (numbers of total, first- and co-authored papers in the PubMed database, numbers of papers in high-impact journals) would have predicted the success of biomedical investigators (n = 40) affiliated with the University of Nevada, Reno, prior to, and after completion of significant mentoring and research support (through funded Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence, COBREs), or lack thereof (unfunded COBREs), in 2000–2014. The h-index and similar indices had little prognostic value. Publishing as mid- or even first author in only one high-impact journal was poorly correlated with future success. Remarkably, junior investigators with >6 first-author papers within 10 years were significantly (p < 0.0001) more likely (93%) to succeed than those with ≤6 first-author papers (4%), regardless of the journal’s impact factor. The benefit of COBRE-support increased the success rate of junior faculty approximately 3-fold, from 15% to 47%. Our work defines a previously neglected set of metrics that predicted the success of junior faculty with high fidelity—thus defining the pool of faculty that will benefit the most from faculty development programs such as COBREs.
Highlights
Faculty development has become the topic of considerable interest, with universities increasingly implementing formal mentoring programs to ensure that new faculty find suitable mentors and receive other help with career development (Thorndyke et al, 2006; Bland et al, 2009; Steinert et al, 2009; Bruce et al, 2011)
Junior faculty moved from a phase I Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBREs) to a phase II COBRE (n = 5; only two faculty completed a total of 10 years of COBRE funding), or moved from an unfunded COBRE to a funded COBRE (n = 3), or were included in different years on two different unfunded COBREs (n = 2), but those were a relatively small proportion of the total number of junior faculty (n = 40)
Characterization of groups We first compared the metrics that were compiled for the two groups, the control vs. mentored (=COBRE-supported) groups, to verify that they were essentially equivalent
Summary
Faculty development has become the topic of considerable interest, with universities increasingly implementing formal mentoring programs to ensure that new faculty find suitable mentors and receive other help with career development (Thorndyke et al, 2006; Bland et al, 2009; Steinert et al, 2009; Bruce et al, 2011). Faculty can be divided in three groups: those who don’t need additional support to succeed; those who will never obtain independent research funding, regardless of the effort and money invested in their mentoring; and the ones that fall between these two extremes. The latter are the ones who benefit the most from a mentoring program if it brings them across the threshold of where they can obtain independent status and maintain a productive, externally funded lab. How does one identify these groups in advance—how does one predict future success?
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