Landing an academic job is like an albatross

Tags

academic job market, albatross, job search

No, really.

This post over at EcoEvoEvoEco, which stated “Anyone with a decent record can get a faculty position”, made the rounds on Twitter last night. In it, Andrew Hendry posits that, based on his experience (in 2001), if one is not picky (i.e., has minimal selection criteria), and ’sticks with it’, one will end up a tenured professor somewhere, and voila, problem solved.

Unsurprisingly, this elicited a rather fierce reaction by some readers. The academic job market has changed since 2001. ’Not being picky’ amounts to moving anywhere regardless of family, or other constraints. And what I think is perhaps the most germane (here, and in many of these advice posts to academic job seekers): this is the experience of one individual in one set of circumstances in a process that, as someone described it, has high variance and and multiple confounding covariates.

Now, instead of throwing gas on the fire of this perennial topic, I want you, dear reader, to consider the albatross.

An albatross (of the Atlantic Yellow-nosed variety). Consider it, please.

Because ultimately, this whole discussion is one of demographics, and if there’s one thing I now a bit about (aside from tea, improv, puns, and naan bread), it’s demography. It’s a significant part of my research, and I think the whole ’I can academic job AND SO CAN YOU!!1!’ can learn something from it. But first, some basics.

Albatross lay a single egg each year (or every 2 or 3 years in some cases). Chicks fledge (usually about 70% of the time), and spend the next 5-18 years at sea before returning to land to breed for the first time, and recruit into the breeding population. They then breed (at some interval) for many, many years, and then perish. Albatross’s annual survival can be grouped, broadly, into 4 categories:

• S1 – the survival of chicks in the first year
• S2 – the survival of immature birds at sea
• S3 – the survival of birds recruited into the breeding population
• S4 – the survival of old birds nearing the end of their natural lives

S1 and S2 are always lower than S3. Those years at sea are tough. Birds have to find enough food, figure out migration, avoid getting caught in fishing gear, learn that eating plastic is bad, and make it to breeding age, court and find a mate.

Breeding adults tend to have high survival. They know what they’re doing, know how to find food for them, and for their chicks, and are pretty adept at avoiding longlines. But as they get older (in some cases, 40, 50, 60+ years old), their reproductive success can drop, and so does survival, and they disappear.

How do we know this?

Scientists have, collectively, put millions of small metal rings/bands on birds, and looked for these individuals year after year, or had bands from dead birds sent in from fishing vessels. And we know that these survival rates, S1 through S4, depend on a plethora of covariates: species, site, year, climate, individual quality, introduced predators, fishing effort, sea temperatures, food availability, … We also have to consider those albatross for whom we don’t know the ultimate fate… they simply didn’t show up in year x, but may show up again in the future.

Consider the case of Wisdom, a Laysan Albatross on Midway Atoll. At 64, she’s the oldest bird of known age, and is showing no signs of stopping. But also consider the case of the much lesser-known J22503. J22503 was a Tristan Albatross chick that our team banded on Gough Island in September 2014. S/he was found dead 2 months later, the victim of predation, mice, starvation, or some other factor.

Now, let’s swap ’albatross’ for ’academic’ (leaving aside, for the moment, that this also applies to some non-academic scientists, too).

Academics can apply to many jobs in a year, but the survival rate of those applications is low (at the population level; S2). After enough years of zero job application survival, the academic perishes (stops looking for academic work). And there are many factors that influence academic survival during this ’immature’ phase, while ’at sea’: gender, location, field, sub-field, individual quality, … And some proportion of academics survive this period (find a job), and thereafter have high annual survival (S3) until they approach retirement (S4).

Any scientist worth their salt would tell you it’s pointless to extrapolate from Wisdom, or J22503, to all albatross worldwide. Or even all Laysan (or Tristan) Albatross. Or even all albatross of the same species in the same site in the same year. We simply need a bigger sample. The same is true of academics. A good mark-recapture (or demographic) study needs a minimum of 200 ’marked individuals’ to estimate annual survival (and that applies to each strata we want to potentially consider!). Extrapolating from 1, or 2, or even 10 isn’t sound.

In 2013, I solicited some data on the number of job applications & interviews, and got a decent response. But even this is far too low a sample size (n = 63) to be of much use. What we need is, ultimately, a study that follows the job applications of quite literally thousands of hopeful academics from graduation to their exit from the job market (for whatever reason), along with all the covariates that we know influence job application success. I certainly lack the time (and IRB approval) for such a study. But in the meantime, remember that ’your mileage may vary’, and extrapolating from one person’s (or even 10 people’s) experience is perilous.

—

Note that I’ve also not said anything about density dependence and carrying capacity of the academic population. Or about how both of those parameters change over time (and have likely changed since 2001). Or about luck and stochasticity. You get this idea.

Yes, there are things one can do to try and improve the probability of a successful job application, but these are by no means a guarantee, and criteria vary by field, location, institution, department, moon phase, …

And I get that these posts are trying to be helpful in some way – showing that success is indeed possible. But they often gloss over many of the finer details (much like How To Draw An Owl).

UPDATE: Katie Burke pointed out on Twitter that a better analogy would be one where leaving the academic job search is a transition to another state, or permanent emigration, rather than death. I, myself, have done such a transition. The model then becomes a multi-state mark-recapture, with all the joys that entails.

The advantages of Google Scholar for early-career academics

Tags

google scholar, job search, metrics

It’s that time of year again – time to spruce up the CV, brush off that research statement, and tweak my teaching philosophy in preparation for the impending start of the next hiring cycle.

One of the key elements of any application where there’s some involvement in research is the list of publications, and related individual metrics.  Like it or not, hiring committees care about how much and where you publish, and how often those papers are cited (or at least we’re told they do).  Besides listing publications on your CV, I thought I’d pass along a handy tip – use the profile tool in Google Scholar.

This lets you add in your publications, and keep track of the citations, but more importantly, you can link to it on your CV.  In my case, I created a custom URL using tinyurl.com so that instead of random characters, anyone can see my profile by typing http://tinyurl.com/ScholarALB.

But why would you want to do this in the first place?  If, like me, you’re on the job market, it’s a quick, independent way to check a candidate’s publication record.  It’s easy to “embellish” a CV, and a Google Scholar profile is often on the first page or two of results when someone searches my name in Google (i.e., perfect for a search committee).  It also helps a search committee look at the individual-level metrics.  Sure, I may have published in the West-central Podunk Journal of Ecology (impact factor < 0), but perhaps that’s a highly-cited paper, though some search committee members might not know the journal.  Similarly, I may have an article in the journal Science from 2003 that hasn’t been cited once.  Remember that search committees may not necessarily know the relative reputations of journals in one’s field – yet another plus of individual-level metrics.

Sure, there are lots of other services that provide these metrics, including most article indexing services like Scopus and Web of Knowledge, but not all institutions subscribe to those (often expensive) resources.  The program Publish or Perish also gives individual-level metrics, but Google Scholar is free for anyone to see, and can be accessed with a single click.

Be warned though – not all these services are created equal.  Scopus, WOK (and its well-known component Biological Abstracts) each index different sets of journals, and so come up with different numbers.  Publish or Perish uses a combination of Google Scholar, and the less well known Microsoft Academic Search to get its citation data, but at the moment is Windows-only, and needs to be downloaded & installed.

As an example of how these can differ, below are some summary stats of my own

Metric	Google Scholar	Scopus	Web of Knowledge	Publish or Perish
# publications	38	30	29	18
# citations	233	254	142	217
h-index	8	7	7	8
i10-index	8	6	5	8

h-index = the number of papers, n, that have been cited n times. In other words, I have 8 papers that have been cited at least 8 times.

i10-index = the number of papers cited at least 10 times.

 

They’re all in the same ballpark (though Web of Knowledge is noticeably lower), but Google Scholar is the most accessible.  That said, Google has cut more popular services (most notably Google Reader), so who knows how long Scholar will stay around.

I don’t particularly care for using Scholar when doing a broad literature search (mostly because of the lack of sorting options for the results), but as an online freely-accessible source of individual scientists’ publishing metrics, it’s not bad (though the system can be gamed to bump up citation counts).  Still, at this point, I think the benefits, especially to early-career researchers who are on the job market, outweigh the potential costs.

Lastly, here are a few tips to bring your Google Scholar profile beyond the default:

• Add a profile picture / head shot
• Set up alerts for when new articles are added to your profile automatically, and edit / adjust if needed:
  • All-caps vs. sentence case titles
  • odd characters that are the result of formatting
  • Journal title / abbreviations
• Add non-indexed items yourself (e.g., book chapters, monographs, reports)