We approach productivity in science in a longitudinal fashion: We track careers over time, up to 40 years. We first allocate scientists to decile-based publishing productivity classes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10%. Then, we seek patterns of mobility between the classes in two career stages: assistant professorship and associate professorship. Our findings confirm that radically changing publishing productivity levels (upward or downward) almost never happens. Scientists with a very weak past track record in publications emerge as having marginal chances of becoming scientists with a very strong future track record across all science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. Hence, our research shows a long-term character of careers in science, with publishing productivity during the apprenticeship period of assistant professorship heavily influencing productivity during the more independent period of associate professorship. We use individual-level microdata on academic careers (from a national registry of scientists) and individual-level metadata on publications (from the Scopus raw dataset). Polish associate professors tend to be stuck in their productivity classes for years: High performers tend to remain high performers, and low performers tend to remain low performers over their careers. Logistic regression analysis powerfully supports our two-dimensional results. We examine all internationally visible Polish associate professors in five fields of science in STEMM fields (N = 4,165 with N art = 71,841 articles).

翻译：我们采用纵向方法研究科研生产力：对科研人员的职业生涯进行长达40年的追踪。首先将科研人员按发表产出划分为基于十分位的生产力等级（从最低10%到最高10%）。随后，我们探究两个职业阶段（助理教授期与副教授期）间等级流动的模式。研究结果证实：发表生产力水平发生根本性改变（上升或下降）的情况几乎不存在。在所有科学、技术、工程、数学和医学（STEMM）领域中，过去发表记录薄弱的科研人员未来成为高产研究者的概率极低。因此，本研究揭示了科研职业生涯的长期性特征——助理教授学徒期的发表生产力对其后更为独立的副教授阶段生产力具有决定性影响。我们采用个体层面的学术职业生涯微观数据（来自国家科研人员注册系统）与个体层面的发表元数据（来自Scopus原始数据集）。波兰副教授往往长期固守其生产力等级：高产出者在整个职业生涯中保持高产，低产出者则持续低产。逻辑回归分析有力支持了我们的二维研究结论。本研究覆盖STEMM领域五个学科所有具有国际可见度的波兰副教授（样本量N=4,165人，文献量N_art=71,841篇）。