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Increased academic performance and prolonged career duration among principal investigators in ecology and evolutionary biology in Taiwan

View ORCID ProfileGen-Chang Hsu, Wei-Jiun Lin, View ORCID ProfileSyuan-Jyun Sun
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.31.478501
Gen-Chang Hsu
1Department of Life Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
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Wei-Jiun Lin
2Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
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Syuan-Jyun Sun
3Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
4International Degree Program in Climate Change and Sustainable Development, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan
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  • For correspondence: sjs243@ntu.edu.tw
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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 the field of ecology and evolutionary biology, we analyzed the academic performance (measured as h-index) as well as the duration before recruitment as a new faculty member and promotion to full professor of 145 principal investigators (PI) over the past 34 years in Taiwan. We found that PIs had higher performance and longer duration before recruitment more recently. Performance before promotion remained stable, whereas the duration increased over time. The origin and prestige of doctorate had no effect on the performance or duration either before recruitment or before promotion. We also found that the difference in performance before and after recruitment (“After” performance — “Before” performance) decreased in recent years, with PIs recruited in earlier years maintaining their performance after recruitment while those recruited in later years exhibiting a performance drop. While PIs performed equally well before and after recruitment irrespective of doctorate origin, those with domestic PhD degrees showed a decrease in performance after promotion compared to their counterparts with foreign degrees. Taken together, our findings reveal a prolonged career duration for researchers as a result of intensifying competition in academia, and 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.

Footnotes

  • We have updated some of our results and analyses, as well as the discussion section.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted September 01, 2022.
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Increased academic performance and prolonged career duration among principal investigators in ecology and evolutionary biology in Taiwan
Gen-Chang Hsu, Wei-Jiun Lin, Syuan-Jyun Sun
bioRxiv 2022.01.31.478501; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.31.478501
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Increased academic performance and prolonged career duration among principal investigators in ecology and evolutionary biology in Taiwan
Gen-Chang Hsu, Wei-Jiun Lin, Syuan-Jyun Sun
bioRxiv 2022.01.31.478501; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.31.478501

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