Are Scientists Changing their Research Productivity Classes When They Move Up the Academic Ladder?

We approach productivity in science in a longitudinal fashion: We track careers over time, up to 40 years. We first allocate scientists to decile-based publishing productivity classes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10%. Then, we seek patterns of mobility between the classes in two career stages: assistant professorship and associate professorship. Our findings confirm that radically changing publishing productivity levels (upward or downward) almost never happens. Scientists with a very weak past track record in publications emerge as having marginal chances of becoming scientists with a very strong future track record across all science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. Hence, our research shows a long-term character of careers in science, with publishing productivity during the apprenticeship period of assistant professorship heavily influencing productivity during the more independent period of associate professorship. We use individual-level microdata on academic careers (from a national registry of scientists) and individual-level metadata on publications (from the Scopus raw dataset). Polish associate professors tend to be stuck in their productivity classes for years: High performers tend to remain high performers, and low performers tend to remain low performers over their careers. Logistic regression analysis powerfully supports our two-dimensional results. We examine all internationally visible Polish associate professors in five fields of science in STEMM fields (N = 4,165 with N art = 71,841 articles).