Related papers: Scientific productivity as a random walk
This longitudinal study explores persistence in research productivity over time. We examine the trajectories of the academic careers of 2,326 current full professors in 14 STEMM disciplines, studying their lifetime biographical histories…
References are an essential component of research articles and therefore of scientific communication. In this study we investigate referencing (citing) behavior in five diverse fields (astronomy, mathematics, robotics, ecology and…
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…
The field of the mathematical sciences relies on a continuous academic pipeline in which individuals progress from undergraduate study through graduate training and postdoctoral program to long term faculty employment. National statistics…
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…
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…
The pursuit of knowledge is the permanent goal of human beings. Scientific literature, as the major medium that carries knowledge between scientists, exhibits explosive growth during the last century. Despite the frequent use of many…
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…
Changes in citation distributions over 100 years can reveal much about the evolution of the scientific communities or disciplines. The prevalence of uncited papers or of highly-cited papers, with respect to the bulk of publications,…
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…
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…
Human creativity is the ultimate driving force behind scientific progress. While the building blocks of innovations are often embodied in existing knowledge, it is creativity that blends seemingly disparate ideas. Existing studies have made…
The citation potential is a measure of the probability of being cited. Obviously, it is different among fields of science, social science, and humanities because of systematic differences in publication and citation behaviour across…
Faculty mobility is often understood as a mechanism through which universities redistribute scientific talent and potentially improve research performance. Yet the system-level structure of mobility and its association with individual…
Academic papers have been the protagonists in disseminating expertise. Naturally, paper citation pattern analysis is an efficient and essential way of investigating the knowledge structure of science and technology. For decades, it has been…
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…
The recognition of individual contributions is central to the scientific reward system, yet coauthored papers often obscure who did what. Traditional proxies like author order assume a simplistic decline in contribution, while emerging…
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,…
Tenure is a cornerstone of the US academic system, yet its relationship to faculty research trajectories remains poorly understood. Conceptually, tenure systems may act as a selection mechanism, screening in high-output researchers; a…
We followed scientists who started publishing in 2000 and who continued publishing until 2020-2023 (N = 41,424). These survivors in science authored 2 million articles (N = 2,089,097) with more than 70 million cited references (N =…