This paper investigates to what extent there is a ‘traditional’ career among individuals with a Ph.D. in a science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) discipline. We use longitudinal data that follows the first 7–9 years of post-conferral employment among scientists who attained their degree in the U.S. between 2000 and 2008. We use three methods to identify a traditional career. The first two emphasize those most commonly observed, with two notions of commonality; the third compares the observed careers with archetypes defined by the academic pipeline. Our analysis includes the use of machine-learning methods to find patterns in careers; this paper is the first to use such methods in this setting. We find that if there is a modal, or traditional, science career, it is in non-academic employment. However, given the diversity of pathways observed, we offer the observation that traditional is a poor descriptor of science careers.
Contemporary science has been characterized by an exponential growth in publications and a rise of team science. At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of awarded PhD degrees, which has not been accompanied by a similar expansion in the number of academic positions. In such a competitive environment, an important measure of academic success is the ability to maintain a long active career in science. In this paper, we study workforce trends in three scientific disciplines over half a century. We find dramatic shortening of careers of scientists across all three disciplines. The time over which half of the cohort has left the field has shortened from 35 y in the 1960s to only 5 y in the 2010s. In addition, we find a rapid rise (from 25 to 60% since the 1960s) of a group of scientists who spend their entire career only as supporting authors without having led a publication. Altogether, the fraction of entering researchers who achieve full careers has diminished, while the class of temporary scientists has escalated. We provide an interpretation of our empirical results in terms of a survival model from which we infer potential factors of success in scientific career survivability. Cohort attrition can be successfully modeled by a relatively simple hazard probability function. Although we find statistically significant trends between survivability and an author’s early productivity, neither productivity nor the citation impact of early work or the level of initial collaboration can serve as a reliable predictor of ultimate survivability.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1636636
- PAR ID:
- 10081223
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 115
- Issue:
- 50
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 12616-12623
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
Abstract -
more » « less
Societal Impact Statement Humans are dependent upon plants for oxygen, food, textiles, and medicines. Climate change and deforestation represent serious threats to our planet, causing significant disruptions to our ability to access and utilize these plant resources; this makes a botanically literate workforce and plant science careers more important than ever. Unfortunately, the current state of botanical career opportunities and training programs in the United States remains unclear. This study focuses on the current employment trends of government and private sector botanists and what skills future plant scientists will need to be successful in these careers.
Summary Plant science plays a crucial role in our society and in ongoing efforts to address many global challenges, including food insecurity and climate change. Yet, despite a predicted increase in plant science career opportunities in the United States, the botanical career landscape outside of academia is not well understood.
To further our understanding of the training required for non‐academic botanical careers, the botanical sub‐disciplines used on the job, and career challenges faced by plant scientists, we surveyed 61 scientists working in government and 59 scientists working in the private sector in the United States.
In both career sectors, > 80% of survey participants reported recent hires at the bachelor's degree level. New personnel with master's degrees were more commonly reported in the government sector (95%) than in the private sector (69%). Most plant scientists working in government reported a focus on plant ecology and resource management. By contrast, most industry/non‐profit work involved horticulture and biotechnology, with some specific skills spanning both sectors. Notably, one prediction made nearly a decade ago appears to be manifesting: plant scientists seem to be retiring more quickly than they are being replaced. Survey respondents reported that attempts to hire full‐time staff are met with obstacles, including insufficient funding. Plant science professionals in both career sectors emphasized their routine use of botanical skills developed as students, highlighting the need for effective training at the undergraduate level.
We discuss the implications of these findings and present several recommendations for preparing future generations of plant scientists and increasing the scientific community's botanical capacity.
-
more » « less
Abstract A central question in the science of science concerns how to develop a quantitative understanding of the evolution and impact of individual careers. Over the course of history, a relatively small fraction of individuals have made disproportionate, profound, and lasting impacts on science and society. Despite a long-standing interest in the careers of scientific elites across diverse disciplines, it remains difficult to collect large-scale career histories that could serve as training sets for systematic empirical and theoretical studies. Here, by combining unstructured data collected from CVs, university websites, and Wikipedia, together with the publication and citation database from Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), we reconstructed publication histories of nearly all Nobel prize winners from the past century, through both manual curation and algorithmic disambiguation procedures. Data validation shows that the collected dataset presents among the most comprehensive collection of publication records for Nobel laureates currently available. As our quantitative understanding of science deepens, this dataset is expected to have increasing value. It will not only allow us to quantitatively probe novel patterns of productivity, collaboration, and impact governing successful scientific careers, it may also help us unearth the fundamental principles underlying creativity and the genesis of scientific breakthroughs.
-
more » « less
Abstract While inequalities in science are common, most efforts to understand them treat scientists as isolated individuals, ignoring the network effects of collaboration. Here, we develop models that untangle the network effects of productivity defined as paper counts, and prominence referring to high-impact publications, of individual scientists from their collaboration networks. We find that gendered differences in the productivity and prominence of mid-career researchers can be largely explained by differences in their coauthorship networks. Hence, collaboration networks act as a form of social capital, and we find evidence of their transferability from senior to junior collaborators, with benefits that decay as researchers age. Collaboration network effects can also explain a large proportion of the productivity and prominence advantages held by researchers at prestigious institutions. These results highlight a substantial role of social networks in driving inequalities in science, and suggest that collaboration networks represent an important form of unequally distributed social capital that shapes who makes what scientific discoveries.
-
Teamwork has become more important in recent decades. We show that larger teams generate an unintended side effect: individuals who finish their PhD when the average team in their field is larger have worse career prospects. Our analysis combines data on career outcomes from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients with publication data that measures team size from ISI Web of Science. As average team size in a field increased over time, junior academic scientists became less likely to secure research funding or obtain tenure and were more likely to leave academia relative to their older counterparts. The team size effect can fully account for the observed decline in tenure prospects in academic science. The rise in team size was not associated with the end of mandatory retirement. However, the doubling of the NIH budget was associated with a significant increase in team size. Our results demonstrate that academic science has not adjusted its reward structure, which is largely individual, in response to team science. Failing to address these concerns means a significant loss as junior scientists exit after a costly and specialized education in science.more » « less
