Blog
April 24, 2026
New Research Highlights the Rising Bar for Early Career Scientists
At the recent NBER conference on Investments in Early Career Scientists, Dr. Jamie Powers from the Academic Analytics Research Center (AARC) presented a compelling project that quantifies exactly how the expectations for scholarly productivity have evolved over the last decade.
Read More →April 18, 2026
The Myth of Perpetual Productivity: Climbing 'Mount Horribilis'
The 'publish-or-perish' adage has long served as a primary organizing principle for academic careers, operating under the assumption that competitive evaluation systems successfully incentivize continuous research output. However, a recent study by Keith Goldstein, Gad Yair, and Nir Rotem, published in the journal 'Higher Education', challenges this assumption by revealing a massive, previously hidden landscape of non-productive years.
Read More →April 16, 2026
Revisiting The 2023 SRI Update: An Empirical Methodology
In 2023, the Scholarly Research Index (SRI) underwent a significant methodological update. This work was a collaboration between the Academic Analytics Research Center (AARC) and the Academic Analytics Analyst Team...
Read More →April 10, 2026
Assessing Organizational Resilience: The Departmental Fragility Index (DFI)
The Departmental Fragility Index (DFI) provides a robust framework for assessing academic sustainability by measuring the structural concentration of scholarly assets within departments. Moving beyond simple performance metrics, the methodology utilizes the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) to identify 'hub-and-spoke' vulnerabilities in funding, awards, and collaborative networks. The resulting composite score dynamically adjusts for disciplinary norms, offering academic leadership a diagnostic tool for fostering long-term organizational resilience.
Read More →March 4, 2026
Tracking 13 Years of Faculty Migration and Attrition
Are faculty moving due to state-level political or other pressures more than expected, or is what we observe recently a standard part of academic career mobility? In a period of intense political polarization and shifting labor markets, understanding the difference between migration (moving to a new university) and attrition (leaving the system entirely) has never been more critical.
Read More →January 21, 2026
Methodological Note: Automated Visual Verification for Large-Scale Demographic Inference
Our current project investigates women's representation among over 300,000 faculty members across U.S. higher education institutions. To ensure the reliability of our findings, we required a robust mechanism to validate our name-based classifiers against a ground-truth dataset.
Read More →November 17, 2025
Beyond "peers as usual": a dual-lens framework for university benchmarking
Higher education leaders are under unprecedented pressure to justify investments and demonstrate a clear return on their strategic plans. This document proposes a conceptual framework for peer analysis, intended to spark discussion on how we might better leverage institutional data.
Read More →November 6, 2025
The asymmetry of talent: new research reveals the position of HBCUs in the academic marketplace
For decades, those in higher education have understood the profound importance of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). These institutions, born from necessity in an era of exclusion, have long been, and remain, the bedrock of Black professional advancement in America.
Read More →August 29, 2025
The art of nuance: why "arts and humanities" must be disaggregated
In my work at the Academic Analytics Research Center (AARC), I spend a great deal of time thinking about how we measure and understand scholarship. The tools of scientometrics and bibliometrics are powerful, but they must be wielded with purpose and precision. When we use flawed categories to measure scholarly output, the resulting analyses, no matter how sophisticated, are also flawed.
Read More →July 23, 2025
What really happens after tenure? A major new study reveals a post-tenure pivot
For decades, the effect of academic tenure on faculty research has been a subject of debate, often based more on anecdote than evidence. Does the job security of tenure lead to a decline in productivity, or does it give researchers the freedom to pursue more innovative work?
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