What is the best article publishing strategy for early career scientists?

To date, it remains unclear how different approaches to early career publishing behaviors (e.g., publishing papers in the same journal or in different journals) may benefit a young scholar’s career success. In this paper, we develop a quantitative understanding of this question, analyzing 2982 qualified authorships who have academic ages ≥ 5 years and publications ≥ 3 during the first five years of their careers from 37,542 publications in three fields of science. We defined author categories by three particular publishing behaviors, and determined how authors performed in their subsequent academic careers by using six bibliometric proxies. From the results of Welch’s ANOVA and Games–Howell multiple comparisons test, we found that the best publishing choice included publishing some of the author’s papers in the same journal. This early career publishing choice may produce a dramatic increase in career success as seen in higher numbers of publications and collaborators, and a higher h-index, with different magnitudes for different scientific fields and authorships. Our findings illustrate the role that early career publishing behavior plays in relation to future career success and indicate that in order to maximize career outcomes, an advantageous publishing strategy for early career scholars is to publish some of their papers in the same journal.