Book Description

In today's competitive job market, many students graduate with a bachelor's degree and move on to pursue higher education in hopes of standing out from the crowd. As the number of graduate students has steadily increased in the recent years, there is also growing interest in understanding how to cultivate successful graduate careers. Surprisingly, there has been little empirical work examining this topic. The current dissertation has two primary aims: 1. to quantify graduate school performance and 2. explore some of the potential predictors of success. Because publication output is believed to be the most valuable metric of success, the primary focus was on publications. Chapter 1 examines the publication trajectories of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and junior faculty members to establish a benchmark of success. Junior faculty members had twice the number of publications as post-doctoral fellows, who had twice the number of publications as senior graduate students. Chapter 2 and 3 aim to better accurately quantify a researcher's scientific output beyond just the number of publications with the introduction of a new bibliometric index called the zp-index. The zp-index, compared to other bibliometric indices, better discriminated the productive output of high-functioning academics. Finally, Chapter 4 identifies potential personality predictors of graduate school performance. Industriousness was a key variable that predicted publication success. Results across the studies provide practical recommendations to apply to the current graduate school system and highlight some potential avenues for future research on this understudied topic.