The best proof to date that scientists are most innovative and creative early in their careers comes from a recent study.
Results revealed that, on one crucial metric, the impact of published work by biomedical scientists decreases over the course of their careers by half to two-thirds.
Bruce Weinberg, an economist at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study, said, “That’s a huge decline in impact.”
We found that as biomedical scientists get older, their work becomes less creative and important.
Weinberg says that the reasons for this trend of less innovation make the findings more complicated and show how important it is to keep helping scientists as they get older.
The Journal of Human Resources released the study’s online version on October 7, 2022.
For nearly 150 years, researchers have been examining the connection between age or experience and inventiveness, but no clear consensus has been reached. In reality, according to Weinberg, the results have been “all over the place.”
“It is pretty amazing that we still don’t have a definitive answer on a topic that has been studied for so long by so many people with so many different approaches.”
The fact that the authors of this study had access to a sizable dataset of 5.6 million biomedical science articles that were published over a 30-year period, from 1980 to 2009, and compiled by MEDLINE, was one of its advantages. These datasets contain comprehensive author information.
The number of times other scientists cited (or “cited”) a study in their own work was used in this new study to gauge how innovative the biomedical scientists’ articles were. People think that the more times a study is cited, the more important it is.
The researchers in this study were able to compare how frequently scientists’ work was cited early in their careers compared to later in their careers because they had detailed information on the authors of each paper.
While analyzing the data, Weinberg and his coworkers discovered something essential to understanding how innovation changes over the course of a career.
They discovered that early-career scientists who were the least innovative tended to leave the field and stop publishing new findings. It was the most important and productive group of young scholars who were still publishing research 20 or 30 years later.
“Scientists exhibit a wide range of innovation early in their careers. However, as time goes on, we observe a selective attrition of those who are less inventive, “said Weinberg.
Therefore, it doesn’t appear that innovation is dwindling over time when you consider all biomedical scientists as a group. However, the fact that the least inventive researchers are leaving their fields when they are still relatively young hides the fact that an individual’s level of inventiveness tends to decrease over the course of their career. ”
The findings showed that, on average, a researcher’s late-career scientific publications received one-half to two-thirds fewer citations than their earlier work.
But citation counts aren’t the only way to show that researchers were less creative as their careers went on.
Huifeng Yu, co-author and PhD candidate at the University at Albany, SUNY, said, “We constructed additional metrics that capture the breadth of an article’s impact based on the range of fields that cite it, whether the article is employing the best and latest ideas, citing the best and latest research, and whether the article is drawing from multiple disciplines.”
These other metrics also support the finding that innovativeness is declining.
Weinberg says that the fact that less creative scientists are being weeded out may help to explain why the results of earlier studies were so different.
Studies with Nobel laureates and other distinguished researchers, whose attrition rates are generally low, tend to find earlier innovation peak ages. Studies with a bigger group of scientists, on the other hand, don’t usually find an early peak in creativity because they don’t take attrition into account.
According to Weinberg, attrition in the scientific community may not be solely related to innovation. Even though this study can’t measure the effects, women and underrepresented minorities in science may not have had the chances they needed to do well.
He said that the successful scientists “probably did well because of a mix of talent, luck, personal background, and previous training.”
The results show that funding agencies for scientists need to find a way to promote both people with and without a lot of experience.
“Young scientists are typically at the height of their creativity, but there is a wide range, with some being significantly more inventive than others. “You might not be funding the top researchers,” Gerald Marschke, an associate professor of economics at the University at Albany and one of the study’s co-authors, said,
You get scientists who have stood the test of time when they are older and more experienced, but they are typically no longer performing at their peak.
Matthew Ross from New York University and Joseph Staudt from the U.S. Census Bureau were additional study co-authors.
The study was paid for by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research, the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
