Statistics on UCSD’s Cognitive Science Faculty Candidates

UC San Diego’s Cognitive Science Department is one of the top departments in the United States. In 2013, they interviewed four faculty candidates from the Salk Institute, NYU, UC San Francisco, and Stanford. I briefly went through their CVs to get an idea of what traits the Cognitive Science department is looking for. I tried to screen out abstracts from places such as VSS and SFN. Here are their average publication statistics:

• 16.3±4.5 Total Publications Each (Range: 10 – 20)
• 8.3±1.7 First Author Publications Each (Range: 6 – 10)
• 7.8±1.0 h-Index Each (Range: 7 – 9)
• 323.8±152.1 Total Citations Each (adding together all of a person’s papers)

The number of high impact venue publications (e.g., Nature, Neuron) ranged from 0 to 5 papers each, with a mean of 2 papers.

Note that they each did a postdoc for 2 to 5 years, with a mean of 4 years.

This is a small sample size. I’ll next do the same exercise for the Computer Science and Engineering department, which interviewed a lot more people.

For more statistics on cognitive science and neuroscience hiring, see this article.