There is theoretical disagreement about the relative importance of scholarly productivity and PhD department prestige in determining job market success among new doctorate recipients. The degree to which productivity determines professional rewards—including employment in higher education—is important both because meritocratic sensibilities dictate that talent and hard work should matter more than who one knows or where one comes from and, further, because the integrity of academia is at stake when rewards are distributed to professors based on criteria other than the quality of their research and teaching. Using survey and archival data I have collected on the academic background, publications, demographic characteristics, and employment outcomes of approximately 2,000 new PhDs in three fields representing the major divisions of the academy—physics, sociology, and English—I conduct logistic regression analyses to estimate the effects of pregraduation publications, race, sex, and PhD department prestige on whether new PhDs secure academic employment upon graduation. I hypothesize that the relative importance of scholarship and prestige varies across the academy such that prestige, race, and sex matter more in fields with less disciplinary consensus on theory and method. Results are generally consistent with Merton's notion that the rewards structure of science operates according to an “universalistic” imperative when recruiting new PhDs into junior research and professorial positions. Findings indicate that pregraduation scholarly productivity, particularly in the form of sole-authored research articles, has consistently stronger effects than PhD prestige, race, or sex for attainment of postdoctoral research positions in the natural sciences. However, in the social sciences and humanities the effects of PhD prestige often outweigh the effects of pregraduation research articles on attainment of professorships, especially those at Research Universities. Consistent with prior research, analyses of rewards subsequent to entry into academia also reveal that PhD prestige generally has a greater positive effect than publications among newly employed scholars across the academy in determining employment at better paying, wealthier, and more prestigious universities.