Academic careers develop within diverse and complex settings. This project continues the suite of NETWISE projects to examine factors that matter in how tenure-track and research faculty work and advance in their careers.  It examines issues such as research support and infrastructure, collaborative preferences and experiences, institutional support and environment, and other factors.  Subsets of the sample examine issues such as faculty retirement plans and motivators, mobility, mentoring, and other issues salient to faculty careers. This project involves a national survey in doctoral-serving universities in the United States launched in Fall 2024.

Social network methods are used to track changes in the structure of research collaboration over time. The submission of a scientific research proposals as a measure of an instance of collaboration is the basis of this research. Proposals represent a more complete view into collaboration activities than publications because the product studied does not depend on approval from exogenous reviewers. Proposals capture intent to collaborate and can be used as earlier indicators of collaboration than published work. For this study, a single proposal submitted for external funding by more than one investigator is an indicator of collaboration. Information in proposal archives for a 20 year period (2000-2020) is used to link each proposal to all investigators that collaborated to produce and submit the proposal to generate collaboration networks for all participating investigators for each year. Investigator attributes, including disciplinary background, rank, type of appointment, race, ethnicity and sex are used to test hypothesis about collaboration network structure related to inclusion and interdisciplinarity over time.