Related papers: Persistence and Uncertainty in the Academic Career
Teams are the fundamental units propelling innovation and advancing modern science. A rich literature links the fundamental features of teams, such as their size and diversity, to academic success. However, such analyses fail to capture…
Despite persistent efforts to understand the dynamics of creativity of scientists over careers in terms of productivity, impact, and prize, little is known about the dynamics of scientists' disruptive efforts that affect individual academic…
Analyzing a large data set of publications drawn from the most competitive journals in the natural and social sciences we show that research careers exhibit the broad distributions of individual achievement characteristic of systems in…
A scientist may publish tens or hundreds of papers over a career, but these contributions are not evenly spaced in time. Sixty years of studies on career productivity patterns in a variety of fields suggest an intuitive and universal…
Scientists are frequently faced with the important decision to start or terminate a creative partnership. This process can be influenced by strategic motivations, as early career researchers are pursuers, whereas senior researchers are…
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Changing institutions is an integral part of an academic life. Yet little is known about the mobility patterns of scientists at an institutional level and how these career choices affect scientific outcomes. Here, we examine over 420,000…
The expectation that scientific productivity follows regular patterns over a career underpins many scholarly evaluations. However, recent studies of individual productivity patterns reveal a puzzle: the average number of papers published…
We examine the innovation of researchers with long-lived careers in Computer Science and Physics. Despite the epistemological differences between such disciplines, we consistently find that a researcher's most innovative publication occurs…
The present study focuses on persistence in research productivity over the course of an individual's entire scientific career. We track 'late-career' scientists - scientists with at least 25 years of publishing experience (N=320,564) - in…
Throughout history, a relatively small number of individuals have made a profound and lasting impact on science and society. Despite long-standing, multi-disciplinary interests in understanding careers of elite scientists, there have been…
Collaboration networks evolve throughout academic careers, yet few studies systematically examine how these network dynamics relate to long-term career success and mobility. Analysing 35,708 physicists' careers spanning at least 15 years,…
Over the last four decades, the way knowledge is created in academia has transformed dramatically: research teams have grown larger, scholars draw from ever-wider pools of prior work, and the most influential discoveries increasingly emerge…
Scientific collaborations shape ideas as well as innovations and are both the substrate for, and the outcome of, academic careers. Recent studies show that gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from hiring…
Gender inequality in scientific careers has been extensively documented through aggregate measures such as total publications and cumulative citations, yet the temporal dynamics underlying these disparities remain largely unexplored. Here…
The shift from individual effort to collaborative output has benefited science, with scientific work pursued collaboratively having increasingly led to more highly impactful research than that pursued individually. However, understanding of…
It is important to explore how scientists decide their research agenda and the corresponding consequences, as their decisions collectively shape contemporary science. There are studies focusing on the overall performance of individuals with…
We approach productivity in science in a longitudinal fashion: We track careers over time, up to 40 years. We first allocate scientists to decile-based publishing productivity classes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10%. Then, we seek…
We analyze the publication records of individual scientists, aiming to quantify the topic switching dynamics of scientists and its influence. For each scientist, the relations among her publications are characterized via shared references.…
Scientific institutions play a crucial role in driving intellectual, social, and technological progress. Their capacity to innovate depends mainly on their ability to attract, retain, and nurture scientific talent and ultimately make it…