Obviously there must be something wrong here, but I do not know what:
https://twitter.com/EricMerkley/status/1224832155139956736?s=20
Shows the nationalist bias of US schools. A lot of great candidates from Canadian, UK, European schools who won't even get considered for a phone interview because either the school won't be able to pay for the flyout or bc they don't have a proper idea about the pedigree of the foreign department.
This is not a number of publications thing. He has both quality and quantity. He has solo pubs, co-authored pubs, one or two Top-3, a BJPS. I am seriously thinking of leaving my program. I am not in American politics but this record is just so great.
is the number of pubs really the critical measure here?
You gotta have top-tier SOLO pubs these days. Too many grad students are working on "lab" based papers with more senior colleagues. You're competing against ABDs who have solo APRSs. I'm not a fan of what the arms race is doing to the discipline, but that's the reality.
Thinking about this again - could it be a pipeline issue? People might be thinking, OK, you've published a ton, but what do you have in the pipeline that would be credit to our dept.? That might explain hiring of unpublished scholars; perhaps they had much better pipelines than published candidates?
Thinking about this again - could it be a pipeline issue? People might be thinking, OK, you've published a ton, but what do you have in the pipeline that would be credit to our dept.? That might explain hiring of unpublished scholars; perhaps they had much better pipelines than published candidates?
LOLOLOLOL
Ok so what are we supposed to do while sitting in our second postdoc? Not publish because then we won’t have as big of pipeline? The goalpost just never stops moving, does it?
I agree it's rough. But is this really an instance of such absurd unfairness? If someone is a couple years out, has 8 coauthored articles, and one "research in progress" paper that isn't coauthored... what was the diss? Turn 3 of those coauthored pubs into 1 solo and this would likely look very different.
Also yes bias against non-US PhDs.
There is a new norm for faculty to add grad students to papers for doing small tasks to aid in placement. This skews many of the records you see. We have hired people with co-authored top-3 hits that don't produce anything of quality for 5 years. Nowadays you need an insider to know if they are actually as good as their record states, or if they simply had the benefit of getting assigned to a productive faculty member as an RA for a couple of years.
This is clearly a pretty good record for a junior job candidate, and departments out of the top 25 should be all over it. The problem is that departments out of the top 25 are probably looking for other things as well, and may not prioritize long publication lists. These are typically small-ish and idiosyncratic, and many are short on money for flyouts. And it absolutely matters that the candidate is in Canada -- many (most?) of the mid-low tier places would not even look at that file.
As for the top 25, it's not a numbers game unless it's publications in the top-3/5 journals. I know this file would not get a second look at my department.
There are some great hires actually. Such a buyer’s market. A scholar like DS would have been at a top-30 easy 5-7 years ago.
White/Asian males in American politics / behavior: SM (Harvard), GS (Harris), EM (UBC), JM (Emory). Many others with strong records lucked into a single offer: DS (Colorado state) and SW (Indiana)