  A scientist may publish tens or hundreds of papers over a career, but these
contributions are not evenly spaced in time. Sixty years of studies on career
productivity patterns in a variety of fields suggest an intuitive and universal
pattern: productivity tends to rise rapidly to an early peak and then gradually
declines. Here, we test the universality of this conventional narrative by
analyzing the structures of individual faculty productivity time series,
constructed from over 200,000 publications and matched with hiring data for
2453 tenure-track faculty in all 205 Ph.D-granting computer science departments
in the U.S. and Canada. Unlike prior studies, which considered only some
faculty or some institutions, or lacked common career reference points, here we
combine a large bibliographic dataset with comprehensive information on career
transitions that covers an entire field of study. We show that the conventional
narrative confidently describes only one fifth of faculty, regardless of
department prestige or researcher gender, and the remaining four fifths of
faculty exhibit a rich diversity of productivity patterns. To explain this
diversity, we introduce a simple model of productivity trajectories, and
explore correlations between its parameters and researcher covariates, showing
that departmental prestige predicts overall individual productivity and the
timing of the transition from first- to last-author publications. These results
demonstrate the unpredictability of productivity over time, and open the door
for new efforts to understand how environmental and individual factors shape
scientific productivity.
