Career Progression as the Missing Link in Academic Productivity: A Systematic and Bibliometric Review of Human Capital, Workload, and Institutional Context

Abstract

Academic productivity is often modelled as the direct consequence of individual capability, research resources, workload, and institutional support. Such models are useful but incomplete because they understate the institutional process through which these inputs are converted into durable advantages. This study advances career progression as the missing linking mechanism between human capital, workload, institutional context, and academic productivity. A systematic evidence synthesis and bibliometric mapping were conducted on a curated corpus of 50 DOI-verified articles published between 2020 and 2025 in four SJR Q1 journals: Scientometrics, Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, and Research Policy. The corpus contained 146 unique authors; 84% of the articles were multi-authored, with an average of 3.04 authors per article. Bibliometric mapping of normalized thematic keywords identified 20 recurrent terms connected through 75 co-occurrence links and five thematic communities. Productivity was the most frequent term, followed by institutional context, gender, funding, career progression, collaboration, and human capital. The temporal structure of the map indicates a shift from broad debates on funding and publication toward career progression, early-career conditions, research evaluation, authorship, and longitudinal trajectories. The systematic synthesis shows that human capital and prior research performance generate cumulative advantages, but these advantages are neither automatic nor institutionally neutral. Workload allocation, promotion criteria, research funding, mobility, prestige, collaboration, and gendered opportunity structures determine whether individual capabilities are translated into rank, autonomy, resources, and sustained output. The study therefore proposes a dynamic resource-conversion model in which career progression functions both as a mediator and a feedback mechanism: productivity improves advancement prospects, while advancement redistributes resources that can further amplify productivity. This interpretation integrates fragmented higher-education and science-of-science literatures and offers a testable agenda for longitudinal, multi-level, and cross-national research.