Introduction. Academic advancements as well as funding depend on publications and
thus pressure researchers to publish. The perception of the pressure to publish is
tied to career stage. The uncertain future careers of PhD-students and postdocs cause
them to be more aware of publication pressure.Method. Using a data set of health sciences
PhD-students from the University of Southern Denmark, this paper investigates whether
the productivity and citation impact of PhD-students has increased over time. We use
a pseudo-experimental matching method to ensure that former and contemporary PhD-students
have similar characteristics as measured by a number of balancing variables.Analysis.
The matching method enables us to estimate productivity and impact by an ordinary
t-test using standard statistical software packages.Results. Collectively, after completion
of the PhD-program the PhD-students from the new cohort publish more than the PhD-students
from the old cohort. The results of the citation analyses show that on average, the
publications by the new cohort from years 1 through 5 after graduation receive more
citations than the publications by the old cohort. Yet, when comparing normalized
and fractionalized citation counts, the cohorts are remarkably similar.Conclusions.
PhD-students have increased their publication rate although the citation rates have
not changed.
