Methods

I downloaded publicly available names of researchers that received NSERC Postdoc Fellowships (PDFs) in the research subjects of Evolution and Ecology (Evo. & Eco.) and Plant and Tree Biology (Plant & Tree Bio.) from 1990-2023.

Winners of the NSERC PDFs from 1990-2020 were available from the Awards Database, whereas winners from 2020-2023 were available on Competition Results pages.

I looked them up on Google Scholar using the scholar::get_scholar_id() to get their Scholar ID. scholar::get_profile() was used to retrieve the Areas of Interest listed in their Google Scholar profile. If the Areas of Interest were missing or if they looked wrong, I manually looked them up. Names that did not return Areas of Interest were also manually looked up.

I then used ‌scholar::get_publications() to download a list of their publications. First-author papers were counted where the lastname of the first author (first in the list) was detected in the awardee’s name. I filtered for papers that were published during or before the competition year.

To filter out non-peer-reviewed publications, I only counted papers published in journals listed in Scimago (using ikashnitsky/sjrdata).

Outliers were manually checked.

Results

• I downloaded profiles for 180 Evo. & Eco. and 46 Plant & Tree Bio. PDF winners.
• In the year that they applied, 50% of Evo. & Eco. winners had 2–6 first author pubs (median = 4) and 50% of Plant & Tree Bio. winners had 1.25–4 first author pubs (median = 2.5).

Figures

Notes

• I did not account for the type of paper. So papers like reviews, commentaries, and editorials are still “first-author” papers.
• For other caveats to this type of data, see this post from Dynamic Ecology.

Code and data

The code and data are deposited on my Github. You might find ways to improve it. https://github.com/aleungplants/nserc-pdf