Five decades of empirical research on the postdoc: a scoping review of the contribution of bibliometrics

Although variety of concerns with the postdoc have been growing internationally, scoping or systematic reviews of research on the topic have been limited to a single field and/or a particular concern, and none have considered publication performance per se, which is arguably a central concern of the postdoc. I address this gap through a scoping review of empirical evidence on the postdoc in general, as published over the past five decades, in terms of volume and research design. I also determine, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the contribution of bibliometrics - as an approach to measurement of publication performance - to that body of evidence. All document types indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus (1970-2020) were searched for spelling variants/derivatives of "postdoc" in the title field. Manual inspection of search results and full-text versions applied predetermined definitions of "the postdoc" and "empirical research". Data on the resulting 260 sources of evidence were analysed, showing an increase in the volume, and the dominance of surveys and secondary analysis, which renders systematic reviews of these feasible. This does not apply to bibliometrics, which has made a small contribution, mostly as part of evaluation studies, and subject to methodological limitations and knowledge gaps.