I’m happy to report that I’ve recently submitted a first paper on the postdoc simulation I’ve been plugging on these pages for some time. I’ve been working in collaboration with Nic Geard of the University of Melbourne and Ian Wood, my officemate at Teesside.
The submitted paper is titled Job Insecurity in Academic Research Employment: An Agent-Based Model. Here’s the abstract:
This paper presents an agent-based model of fixed-term academic employment in a competitive research funding environment. The goal of the model is to investigate the effects of job insecurity on research productivity. Agents may be either established academics who may apply for grants, or postdoctoral researchers who are unable to apply for grants and experience hardship when reaching the end of their fixed-term contracts. Results show that in general adding fixed-term postdocs to the system produces less total research output than adding half as many permanent academics. An in-depth sensitivity analysis is performed across postdoc scenarios, and indicates that promoting more postdocs into permanent positions produces significant increases in research output.
The paper outlines our methodology for the model and analyses a number of different sets of scenarios. Alongside the comparison to permanent academic hires mentioned above, we also look closely at unique aspects of the postdoc life cycle, such as the difficult transition into permanent employment and the stress induced by an impending redundancy. For the sensitivity analysis we used a Gaussian process emulator, which allows us to gain some insight into the effects of some key model parameters.
The paper will be under review for the Alife XV conference very shortly, so I don’t want to pre-empt the conference by posting the full text here. If — fingers crossed — it gets accepted, I’ll post a PDF as soon as it’s appropriate. If you want a preview or are interested in collaborating on future versions of the model, please get in touch!
Dr Eric Silverman 