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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…
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science suggests that this choice is shaped by an "essential tension" between the professional demand for…
Scientific discovery is shaped by scientists' choices and thus by their career patterns. The increasing knowledge required to work at the frontier of science makes it harder for an individual to embark on unexplored paths. Yet…
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…
Understanding the qualitative patterns of research endeavor of scientific authors in terms of publication count and their impact (citation) is important in order to quantify success trajectories. Here, we examine the career profile of…
Scientific literature till date can be thought of as a partially revealed landscape, where scholars continue to unveil hidden knowledge by exploring novel research topics. How do scholars explore the scientific landscape , i.e., choose…
The impact and originality are two critical dimensions for evaluating scientific publications, measured by citation and disruption metrics respectively. Despite the extensive effort made to understand the statistical properties and…
Citations are commonly held to represent scientific impact. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence in support of this postulate that is central to research assessment exercises and Science of Science studies. Here, we report on…
Science is a cumulative activity, which can manifest itself through the act of citing. Citations are also central to research evaluation, thus creating incentives for researchers to cite their own work. Using a dataset containing more than…
As a simple means for comparing and - if possible - predicting scientific impacts of different researchers working in the same field, we suggest comparing their "sales curves". A sales curve is the number of citations of the researcher's…
Open science is increasingly recognised worldwide, with preprint posting emerging as a key strategy. This study explores the factors influencing researchers' adoption of preprint publication, particularly the perceived effectiveness of this…
International mobility in academia can enhance the human and social capital of researchers and consequently their scientific outcome. However, there is still a very limited understanding of the different mobility patterns among scholars…
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…
In this work we ask whether and to what extent applying a predictor of publications' impact better than early citations, has an effect on the assessment of research performance of individual scientists. Specifically, we measure the total…
Scientists pursue collective knowledge, but they also seek personal recognition from their peers. When scientists decide whether or not to work on a big new problem, they weigh the potential rewards of a major discovery against the costs of…
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…
An original cross sectional dataset referring to a medium sized Italian university is implemented in order to analyze the determinants of scientific research production at individual level. The dataset includes 942 permanent researchers of…
Understanding how institutional changes within academia may affect the overall potential of science requires a better quantitative representation of how careers evolve over time. Since knowledge spillovers, cumulative advantage,…
Most scientific institutions acknowledge the importance of opening the so-called 'ivory tower' of academic research through popularization, industrial collaboration or teaching. However, little is known about the actual openness of…
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…