Modeling the Academic Publication Pipeline

In recent years, many academic institutions have implemented more stringent academic qualification standards by increasing research requirements for faculty. This paper analyzes the impact of changing research requirements in terms of faculty research output. We model the academic research pipeline including review and revision processes as a queue network and study the stationary behavior of the research pipeline. Both a theoretical model of the publication process and a simulation showing numerous combinations of submission strategies and publication requirements are presented. Within this framework, research requirements can be analyzed via probability constraints on the output process, and the research effort that satisfies this constraint is derived. We also study the transitional behavior of the publication queue to understand the convergence towards the stationary solution. Our analyses shows that submission requirements substantially exceed publication requirements if a faculty member is to maintain a required number of publications over any given time interval.