A Survey of H-index, Stress, Tenure & Reference Management software use in Academia

Abstract: We describe the findings of a survey that covered the topics of stress, citation tool use habits, subjective happiness, h-index, research topic and tenure among a sample of 2286 authors of arxiv.org. Ph.D. students report the lowest subjective happiness score among all faculty roles, while tenured faculty report the highest. Tenured faculty report the lowest levels of stress. Undergraduate and graduate students report the highest levels of stress. Non-tenured faculty report stress similar to postdocs. No association between citation management tool usage and h-index was found. The average age at tenure start is 34.9 years. In addition, no significant association between stress levels and the research topic was found