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1. Changing demographics of scientific careers: The rise of the temporary workforce

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800478115  

   Milojević, Staša; Radicchi, Filippo; Walsh, John P. (December 2018, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   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. 

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2. Slow convergence: Career impediments to interdisciplinary biomedical research

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2402646121  

   Berkes, Enrico; Marion, Monica; Milojević, Staša; Weinberg, Bruce A (August 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Despite the long-standing calls for increased levels of interdisciplinary research as a way to address society’s grand challenges, most science is still disciplinary. To understand the slow rate of convergence to more interdisciplinary research, we examine 154,021 researchers who received a PhD in a biomedical field between 1970 and 2013, measuring the interdisciplinarity of their articles using the disciplinary composition of references. We provide a range of evidence that interdisciplinary research is impactful, but that those who conduct it face early career impediments. The researchers who are initially the most interdisciplinary tend to stop publishing earlier in their careers—it takes about 8 y for half of the researchers in the top percentile in terms of initial interdisciplinarity to stop publishing, compared to more than 20 y for moderately interdisciplinary researchers (10th to 75th percentiles). Moreover, perhaps in response to career challenges, initially interdisciplinary researchers on average decrease their interdisciplinarity over time. These forces reduce the stock of interdisciplinary researchers who can train future cohorts. Indeed, new graduates tend to be less interdisciplinary than the stock of active researchers. We show that interdisciplinarity does increase over time despite these dampening forces because initially disciplinary researchers become more interdisciplinary as their careers progress. 

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3. A dataset of mentorship in bioscience with semantic and demographic estimations

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01578-x  

   Ke, Qing; Liang, Lizhen; Ding, Ying; David, Stephen V.; Acuna, Daniel E. (December 2022, Scientific Data)

   Abstract Mentorship in science is crucial for topic choice, career decisions, and the success of mentees and mentors. Typically, researchers who study mentorship use article co-authorship and doctoral dissertation datasets. However, available datasets of this type focus on narrow selections of fields and miss out on early career and non-publication-related interactions. Here, we describe Mentorship, a crowdsourced dataset of 743176 mentorship relationships among 738989 scientists primarily in biosciences that avoids these shortcomings. Our dataset enriches the Academic Family Tree project by adding publication data from the Microsoft Academic Graph and “semantic” representations of research using deep learning content analysis. Because gender and race have become critical dimensions when analyzing mentorship and disparities in science, we also provide estimations of these factors. We perform extensive validations of the profile–publication matching, semantic content, and demographic inferences, which mostly cover neuroscience and biomedical sciences. We anticipate this dataset will spur the study of mentorship in science and deepen our understanding of its role in scientists’ career outcomes. 

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4. Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817431116  

   Way, Samuel F.; Morgan, Allison C.; Larremore, Daniel B.; Clauset, Aaron (May 2019, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Faculty at prestigious institutions produce more scientific papers, receive more citations and scholarly awards, and are typically trained at more-prestigious institutions than faculty with less prestigious appointments. This imbalance is often attributed to a meritocratic system that sorts individuals into more-prestigious positions according to their reputation, past achievements, and potential for future scholarly impact. Here, we investigate the determinants of scholarly productivity and measure their dependence on past training and current work environments. To distinguish the effects of these environments, we apply a matched-pairs experimental design to career and productivity trajectories of 2,453 early-career faculty at all 205 PhD-granting computer science departments in the United States and Canada, who together account for over 200,000 publications and 7.4 million citations. Our results show that the prestige of faculty’s current work environment, not their training environment, drives their future scientific productivity, while current and past locations drive prominence. Furthermore, the characteristics of a work environment are more predictive of faculty productivity and impact than mechanisms representing preferential selection or retention of more-productive scholars by more-prestigious departments. These results identify an environmental mechanism for cumulative advantage, in which an individual’s past successes are “locked in” via placement into a more prestigious environment, which directly facilitates future success. The scientific productivity of early-career faculty is thus driven by where they work, rather than where they trained for their doctorate, indicating a limited role for doctoral prestige in predicting scientific contributions. 

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5. The rise of teamwork and career prospects in academic science

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-024-02351-8  

   Andalón, Mabel; de_Fontenay, Catherine; Ginther, Donna K; Lim, Kwanghui (August 2024, Nature Biotechnology)

   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. 

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