Studying Science Scientifically Speaker Series: Chaoqun Ni

Dr. Chaoqun Ni is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Information School, where she co-directs the Metascience Research Lab. She also holds appointments at the Data Science Institute, Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies, and Center for Demography of Health and Aging. She studies science and scholarship, with the goal of exploring the effects of practice and policy-related factors on the cultivation of a competitive scientific workforce. Her research has been published in high-impact journals such as Nature, Science Advances, and eLife. She holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from Indiana University Bloomington. 

Abstract:
Tenure is a foundational element of the U.S. academic system, yet its influence on faculty research trajectories remains largely unexplored. Theoretically, tenure systems may function as a selection mechanism that favors high-output researchers, as a dynamic incentive that drives high productivity before tenure but lowers it afterward, and as a creative search process that encourages tenured faculty to engage in high-risk research. In this study, we integrate data from seven sources to analyze the research outputs of over 12,000 tenure-line faculty across 15 disciplines, providing a comprehensive view of research trajectories on an unprecedented scale. Our findings indicate that publication rates typically increase significantly throughout the tenure track, peaking just before tenure. Post-tenure trends, however, vary by field. Examining creative search behaviors, we find that post-tenure faculty increasingly pursue novel, high-risk research, although this shift is accompanied by a decrease in impact, with fewer high-citation papers produced. Comparisons across career stages and between tenure-based and non-tenure-based settings further highlight that research trajectory shifts are closely aligned with tenure timing. These results offer a new empirical perspective on the tenure system, faculty research pathways, and the patterns of scientific output over academic careers.

About the speaker series:
The CIRSS Friday Speaker Series continues in Fall with a new theme of "Studying Science Scientifically: State of the Art and Prospects for the Science of Science.”   With increasingly rich data sources, exciting new technologies for understanding natural language, and modeling methodologies adapted from diverse domains of scholarship, the opportunities to observe, measure, and model the structure and dynamics of the scientific enterprise abound as never before. We are inviting some of the leading thinkers and most innovative researchers to present at this talk series to illustrate the breadth of advances that have been made, and the many more yet to be made. 

We meet most Fridays, 11am-noon Central time, on Zoom.  Everyone is welcome to attend.  More information, including upcoming speaker schedule and links to recordings, is available on the series website.  For weekly updates on upcoming talks, subscribe to our CIRSS Seminars mailing list.  Our Fall series is led by Timothy McPhillips and Yuanxi Fu, and supported by the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) and the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.