Postdoctoral Training in Bioscience: Allocation and Outcomes

The careers of 557 biochemists are studied in order to answer the following questions: Who gets postdoctoral training and why? How does such training affect subsequent employment opportunities? Does postdoctoral training increase later research productivity? Results show that predoctoral research productivity has no effect on who gets postdoctoral training or where one gets it. Getting postdoctoral training does not seem to affect one's chances of getting a prestigious job, but where the training occurred has a major impact on the prestige of subsequent jobs. In contrast, having had postdoctoral training seems to result in substantial increases in later citation rates, but where the training occurred makes little difference in citation rates. The modest effect of postdoctoral training on publication rates disappears when employment sector is held constant.