PERSPECTIVE Tracking Career Outcomes for Postdoctoral Scholars: A Call to Action Elizabeth A. Silva 1,3 , Christine Des Jarlais 2,3 , Bill Lindstaedt 1,2 , Erik Rotman 2,3 , Elizabeth S. Watkins 3 * 1 Office of Career and Professional Development, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America, 2 Office for Postdoctoral Scholars, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America, 3 Graduate Division, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America * elizabeth.watkins@ucsf.edu Abstract The oversupply of postdoctoral scholars relative to available faculty positions has led to calls for better assessment of career outcomes. Here, we report the results of a study of postdoctoral outcomes at the University of California, San Francisco, and suggest that insti- tutions have an obligation to determine where their postdoc alumni are employed and to share this information with current and future trainees. Further, we contend that local efforts will be more meaningful than a national survey, because of the great variability in training environment and the classification of postdoctoral scholars among institutions. We provide a framework and methodology that can be adopted by others, with the goal of developing a finely grained portrait of postdoctoral career outcomes across the United States. Introduction Both the prodigious output and global preeminence of the United States academic research enterprise depend on the contributions of postdoctoral scholars (postdocs). We posit that post- docs participate in a system that evolved many decades ago, in which they receive mentoring intended to prepare them for independent academic research careers, in exchange for provid- ing labor, producing data, writing manuscripts, and preparing grant applications. We believe this model disproportionately benefits those postdocs who move into faculty positions. Even in institutions with dedicated career professionals and services, the support and guidance for those who eventually move into non-faculty positions is a relatively small part of the complete postdoctoral experience, which is widely viewed as an apprenticeship for a faculty position. While recent literature suggests that only a minority of postdocs move into faculty positions, efforts to determine what postdocs do after their training, and to accurately determine the pro- portion in faculty positions, have consistently failed [1–3]. Over the past 20 years, at least three major reports [1–3], including the recently released The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited from the National Academy of Sciences, have called for improved tracking of the career outcomes of the nation’s postdocs as a prerequisite for addressing their training needs. These calls have largely gone unheeded. PLOS Biology | DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002458 May 6, 2016 1/8 a11111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Silva EA, Des Jarlais C, Lindstaedt B, Rotman E, Watkins ES (2016) Tracking Career Outcomes for Postdoctoral Scholars: A Call to Action. PLoS Biol 14(5): e1002458. doi:10.1371/journal. pbio.1002458 Published: May 6, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Silva et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.