Persistence and uncertainty in the academic career

Alexander Michael Petersen · Massimo Riccaboni · Eugene Stanley · Fabio Pammolli A

187 citations0/0 files storedProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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scientometrics and bibliometrics research Research, Science, and Academia Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis

Abstract

Understanding how institutional changes within academia may affect the overall potential of science requires a better quantitative representation of how careers evolve over time. Because knowledge spillovers, cumulative advantage, competition, and collaboration are distinctive features of the academic profession, both the employment relationship and the procedures for assigning recognition and allocating funding should be designed to account for these factors. We study the annual production n(i)(t) of a given scientist i by analyzing longitudinal career data for 200 leading scientists and 100 assistant professors from the physics community. Our empirical analysis of individual productivity dynamics shows that (i) there are increasing returns for the top individuals within the competitive cohort, and that (ii) the distribution of production growth is a leptokurtic "tent-shaped" distribution that is remarkably symmetric. Our methodology is general, and we speculate that similar features appear in other disciplines where academic publication is essential and collaboration is a key feature. We introduce a model of proportional growth which reproduces these two observations, and additionally accounts for the significantly right-skewed distributions of career longevity and achievement in science. Using this theoretical model, we show that short-term contracts can amplify the effects of competition and uncertainty making careers more vulnerable to early termination, not necessarily due to lack of individual talent and persistence, but because of random negative production shocks. We show that fluctuations in scientific production are quantitatively related to a scientist's collaboration radius and team efficiency.

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References

1962Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention 1968The Matthew Effect in Science 1968The Matthew effect in science. The reward and communication systems of science are considered.2007The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge 2005The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics 2004Knowledge Networks as Channels and Conduits: The Effects of Spillovers in the Boston Biotechnology Community 1976A general theory of bibliometric and other cumulative advantage processes 2004Coauthorship networks and patterns of scientific collaboration

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2018Tales of the unexpected: Integrating career shocks in the contemporary careers literature 2014Career on the Move: Geography, Stratification and Scientific Impact 2017Quantifying patterns of research-interest evolution 2015Quantifying the impact of weak, strong, and super ties in scientific careers 2018Changing demographics of scientific careers: The rise of the temporary workforce

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