Here are the publication records and research topic areas of 63 faculty candidates in the life sciences who interviewed at R1 institutions in 2019-2020.
70% have a first-author paper in Cell, Nature, or Science, 22% have a K99, and 30% have unpublished work on bioRxiv.
70% have a first-author paper in Cell, Nature, or Science, 22% have a K99, and 30% have unpublished work on bioRxiv.
Methods: faculty candidate seminars were found on public departmental websites. Pub records were acquired from Google Scholar or Pubmed, and K99's were found on NIH Reporter. I did my best to summarize research topics by reading the abstracts of a candidate's recent papers.
The candidates were interviewed at a variety of public and private R1 institutions. I focused on departments studying genetics, cell biology, cancer biology, biochemistry, and related fields in the life sciences.
Limitations: the set of job market candidates isn't comprehensive, as only a subset of institutions could be included. For pub records, I tried to count co-first authorships but may have missed some. Twitter accounts only include those that are in a candidate's name.
Motivation: faculty hiring is an exceptionally opaque process, and there is very little information available on what is needed to succeed. I think that such opacity empowers "the old boys' club" and other potential sources of bias.
By collecting and sharing data on faculty searches, I hope that I can make the process more transparent, highlight what the current academic job market looks like, and help people make informed decisions.
Prior data: You can find some of my previous threads on this topic linked below.
Current results: 44% of faculty candidates are postdocs at Stanford, UCSF, or Harvard. 92% of faculty candidates are currently at an institution in the US. 100% are in academia.
The average candidate has 5 first-author publications (median: 4, range: 2-12).
84% have published at least one first-author paper in CNS or a CNS-family journal (Nature Genetics, Science Signaling, etc.).
84% have published at least one first-author paper in CNS or a CNS-family journal (Nature Genetics, Science Signaling, etc.).
71% of interviewees for life science faculty positions have a Twitter account.
60% of the candidates are women. Among the candidates, 55% of women and 92% of men have a CNS paper. Men have an average of 5.6 publications, women have an average of 4.6 publications.
Regarding research topics: I am hesitant to extrapolate too much from this data, as I tried to summarize a candidate's research after very quickly reading their recent papers' abstracts, and there could be huge differences in topics between departments.
But: I think that this data underscores how many faculty interviews are clustered in certain "hot" areas: single-cell biology (6 candidates), phase separation (4), cryo-EM (3), the microbiome (3), etc.
Question: is a K99 required to get an interview?
Unambiguously, no. I've collected similar data for several years, and I consistently see that 20%-25% of candidates have a K99.
Unambiguously, no. I've collected similar data for several years, and I consistently see that 20%-25% of candidates have a K99.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard the rumor that there's some department where the first thing the search committee does is throw out the postdocs who don't have a K99. I've looked for a while, and I can't find evidence that this ever happens.
Question: is a CNS paper required to get an interview?
No - but it probably helps. At some institutions, 70% to 90% of interviewees have a CNS paper. I of course don't know what the base rate is in the applicant pool, but I'd be surprised if it's 70+% CNS.
No - but it probably helps. At some institutions, 70% to 90% of interviewees have a CNS paper. I of course don't know what the base rate is in the applicant pool, but I'd be surprised if it's 70+% CNS.
(At public R1 institutions, the fraction of candidates with CNS papers seems to be lower than at private R1 institutions, but most still have CNS-family publications. See: ).
And, saying that CNS papers *seem* important doesn't mean that they *should be* important, and saying that CNS papers seem *important* for getting an interview doesn't mean that they're *necessary*.
Question: do preprints help?
Yes - I think that this data suggests that candidates occasionally get interviews based on the strength of a preprint. For instance, candidates 27 and 41 seem to have their "major" postdoctoral papers up as preprints, and they received interviews.
Yes - I think that this data suggests that candidates occasionally get interviews based on the strength of a preprint. For instance, candidates 27 and 41 seem to have their "major" postdoctoral papers up as preprints, and they received interviews.
(Also, I don't know the dates when search committees met. One faculty member who's familiar with my analyses jokingly complained to me that they selected someone for an interview based off a preprint, but the preprint was later published in Nature, inflating my "CNS" count).
I think that it's really striking that 70+% of faculty candidates are on Twitter. It underscores how prevalent Twitter is as a medium for scientific conversations in 2020… and, I'd imagine that that percentage is only increasing year by year.
Finally, there are obviously a lot of questions about how COVID19 affected the interview/hiring process. I can say that according to the published seminar dates, these interviews occurred prior to the COVID shutdowns. Beyond that, I don't really know.
I hope that this analysis helps shed some light on what the academic job market looks like, and that it allows scientists to make informed decisions for their careers.
