More than 40 percent of postdocs drop out of academia

A new study found that a significant share of postdoctoral researchers leave academia.

The study, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at the careers of 45,572 researchers in multiple countries who held postdoc positions across 19 academic disciplines over a span of 25 years. It drew on data from Microsoft Academic Graph, a corpus of academic publications and an online professional network.

The study found that 41 percent of postdocs end up leaving academia, at least in part because there aren’t enough faculty positions for them. Postdocs who published less research during their postdoc period than during their Ph.D. program were more likely to drop out of academia.

In contrast, postdocs who published a “hit paper”—in the top 5 percent of most cited papers in a particular field the year it was published—were more likely to land faculty jobs and produce highly cited work early in their faculty roles. Those who moderately changed their research topics between Ph.D. and postdoc or moved to another country for a postdoc were also more likely to get a faculty job.

“Our research highlights that the postdoctoral years are just as critical as the Ph.D. years when evaluating a scientist’s likelihood of successfully entering academia and securing a faculty position,” co-author Bedoor AlShebli, a computational social scientist at New York University Abu Dhabi, told Nature.