Blog
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?
Read More →January 28, 2025
Growth in the number of scholarly journals and articles
The landscape of academic publishing has changed markedly in recent years. Studies have shown that less prestigious journals now publish an increased share of “high impact” papers, others suggest that growth in the numbers of articles published have put a strain on the publishing system, and in some fields the journal article’s growth may have come at the expense of the book as the primary means of knowledge dissemination. Here, we take a brief look at the remarkable growth in the number of both journals and articles published by scholars at Ph.D. granting institutions since 2014.
Read More →January 16, 2025
A new direction for AARC research projects
When we began AARC in 2019, we had no idea how many great research proposals we would see, nor how many important journal articles and other research outcomes would be produced. From explorations of academic hiring networks to studies of the tenure process, and from research on equity in the research ecosystem to investigations of publishing trends, it’s safe to say that the AARC experiment has been a great success.
Read More →January 5, 2023
Data tables: assistant professor population trends at US Ph.D. granting universities (2011-2021)
Supporting data tables for the recently published opinion at Inside Higher Ed "An Uneven Job Market for Assistant Professors" by Peter Lange, Ph.D. & Anthony J. Olejniczak, Ph.D.
Read More →January 3, 2023
Access to labor modulates research output across universities
A recent article in Science Advances employed the Academic Analytics database (via special permission through AARC) to explore some of the factors that contribute to why faculty at elite universities tend to be more productive in terms of research output than their counterparts at non-elite institutions.
Read More →January 2, 2023
Gender differences in the choice of Ph.D. specialization in academic economics
In a recent article published in the journal Labour Economics, researchers sought to understand the factors that influence the field of specialization of economics Ph.D. students.
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