28-07-2025
The Impact Of Faculty Tenure On Research Output Explored In New Study
A new study measures research trajectories associated with the granting of faculty tenure.
Does the awarding of tenure spur or slow the rate of university faculty research output? Do faculty members produce their most impactful work before or after they earn tenure? Do they become more creative and innovative after tenure or does their work take a turn toward safer, more incremental questions after they achieve the tenure milestone.
Those and other questions are explored in a new, large-scale study — Tenure and Research Trajectories — published July 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
The researchers — Giorgio Tripodi, Yifan Qian, Dashun Wang, Benjamin Jones, (all of Northwestern University), Xiang Zheng and Chaoqun Ni (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Dakota Murray (Northeastern University) — examined the careers of 12,611 U.S. faculty members across 15 disciplines, spanning the sciences, engineering, business and social sciences. Each of the scholars had been granted tenure between 2012 and 2015.
Using multiple data sources, the researchers evaluated those faculty member's publication records between 2011 and 2020, thereby capturing the five years before and the five years after each one had been awarded tenure. That time period also ensured that the results were not affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a significant impact on tenure clocks and research production.
On average, they found that publication rates rapidly increased up to the year before tenure, where they hit a peak. The most productive year for faculty on average was the one right before tenure was granted. That productivity was followed by a plateau around the time faculty were given tenure.
This pre- versus post-tenure pattern took place regardless of how many years it took someone to earn tenure. 'Basically, as you start, you grow and produce more, and then (after tenure) there is often a stabilization,' said Tripodi in Northwestern's KelloggInsight.
Research Impact
The researchers also found a similar trend when it came to the publication of a scholar's research that carried the most impact. On average, the number of 'hit' research articles — those in the top 5% of the most frequently cited articles in the same publication year and field—were higher before tenure than after tenure. Faculty typically published their most-cited research article before they received tenure, even after controlling for age.
Major Differences Between Disciplines
However, if one looks at the individual disciplines, major differences in post-tenure publication rates are observed. In non-laboratory-based fields like business, social sciences, and mathematics, there were sharp declines in publication rates after tenure.
In contrast, the publication rates for lab-based fields like biology, engineering and medicine mostly stayed stable after tenure. In other words, those disciplines that tend to depend more on extramural grants to support faculty research saw more sustained productivity.
'This is telling us that tenure, which is universal for professors, interacts with the disciplinary norms and the organizational structure of the scientific workforce,' Tripodi noted.
Exploratory Work Increases After Tenure
Another major finding was that the granting of tenure was associated with an increase in the novelty or exploratory nature of faculty research.
Within the first five years after tenure, about two-thirds of professors starting exploring topics that were new to them, and roughly a third stopped researching one of the topics they previously had studied. Faculty almost always published their single most novel research article after they had earned tenure.
'Contrary to research impact, we see that the most-novel paper tended to appear after tenure,' Tripodi said. 'This is, to some extent, in accordance with the idea that tenure gives you more job security and thus more freedom to explore, and so you embark on potentially more-risky, more-novel projects.'
'Overall, the U.S. tenure system appears powerful and distinctive,' concluded Benjamin Jones. 'Tenure calls forth ever-increasing output during the 'tenure clock' years, followed by a shift to more novel and exploratory work. These trajectories appear distinctive compared with the patterns we see for scientific researchers in other organizational settings, including at either U.S. national laboratories or foreign universities that don't have the tenure system.'
