Abstract
Academic job markets have become increasingly challenging worldwide, yet it remains poorly characterized how competitively-successful candidates should be and what the underlying determinants of their success are. Focusing on ecology and evolutionary biology, we analyzed the academic performance (measured as h-index) as well as the duration for landing a faculty position and promotion to full professor of 145 principal investigators (PI) over the past 34 years in Taiwan. We found that faculty members had higher performance and longer duration before recruitment as a new PI in recent years. Performance before promotion remained stable, whereas the duration increased over time. The origin and prestige of PhD university had no effect on the performance or duration neither for recruitment nor promotion. Our findings highlight the increasingly crucial role of academic performance, rather than PhD degree itself, in determining academic success.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.