Related papers: Early-career setback and future career impact
The average age at which U.S. researchers get their first grant from NIH has increased from 34.3 in 1970, to 41.7 in 2004. These data raise the crucial question of the effects of aging on the scientific creativity and productivity of…
With rising life expectancies around the world and an older scientific workforce than ever before, what does aging mean for individual scientists, and what do aging scientists mean for scientific progress as a whole? Here we examine how…
If the ethnic makeup of the astronomy profession is to achieve parity with the general population within one generation (~30 years), the number of underrepresented minorities earning graduate degrees in astronomy and astrophysics must…
We study group fairness in the context of feedback loops induced by meritocratic selection into programs that themselves confer additional advantage, like college admissions. We introduce a stylized, yet novel inter-generational model for…
Motivations and challenges jointly shape how individuals enter, persist, and evolve within software engineering (SE), yet their interplay remains underexplored across the transition from education to professional practice. We conducted 15…
In many situations people make sequences of similar, but unrelated decisions. Such decision sequences are prevalent in many important contexts including judicial judgments, loan approvals, college admissions, and athletic competitions. A…
Aggressive incentive schemes that allow individuals to impose economic punishment on themselves if they fail to meet health goals present a promising approach for encouraging healthier behavior. However, the element of choice inherent in…
Human understanding of randomness and variation is shaped by a number of cognitive biases. Here we relate a lesser-known cognitive bias, the "outcome orientation", to medical questions and describe the harm that the outcome orientation can…
From artificial intelligence to network security to hardware design, it is well-known that computing research drives many important technological and societal advancements. However, less is known about the long-term career paths of the…
We stress-test the career predictability model proposed by Acuna et al. [Nature 489, 201-202 2012] by applying their model to a longitudinal career data set of 100 Assistant professors in physics, two from each of the top 50 physics…
Background: Programming skills are advantageous to navigate today's society, so it is important to teach them to students. However, failure rates for programming courses are high, and especially students who fall behind early in…
Despite the growing importance of teams in producing innovative and high-impact science and technology, it remains unclear how expertise diversity among team members relates to the originality and impact of the work they produce. Here, we…
The role of skill (fitness) and luck (randomness) as driving forces on the dynamics of resource accumulation in a myriad of systems have long puzzled scientists. Fueled by undisputed inequalities that emerge from actual competitions, there…
Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare. We investigate one possible factor connected with a topic's extraordinary…
New technologies have the power to revolutionize science. It has happened in the past and is happening again with the emergence of new computational tools, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Despite the documented impact…
The traditional path to a software engineering career usually involves a post-secondary diploma in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field. However, many individuals working as software engineers take a non-traditional…
Education is a major source of inequality in income and health. Polygenic indices for educational attainment (EA-PGI) capture both direct and indirect genetic influences on education, but their effects on income and health remain unclear.…
Understanding how competitive pressure affects risk-taking is crucial in sequential decision-making under uncertainty. This study examines these effects using bench press competition data, where individuals make risk-based choices under…
The growing field of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) presents a unique and unexplored case within persistence research, meaning it is unclear how past findings from engineering will apply to this developing field. We…
Reputation is an important social construct in science, which enables informed quality assessments of both publications and careers of scientists in the absence of complete systemic information. However, the relation between reputation and…