All downhill from the PhD? The typical impact trajectory of US academic careers

TL;DR

This study examines the long-term impact trajectories of US academic researchers over 16+ years, revealing that impact generally declines over time and seniority does not guarantee higher impact publications.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that long-term researchers tend to have decreasing impact over their careers, challenging assumptions about seniority and research quality.

Findings

Impact of researchers declines over time.

Senior researchers do not necessarily produce higher impact work.

Decline may be partly due to reduced self-citations.

Abstract

Within academia, mature researchers tend to be more senior, but do they also tend to write higher impact articles? This article assesses long-term publishing (16+ years) United States (US) researchers, contrasting them with shorter-term publishing researchers (1, 6 or 10 years). A long-term US researcher is operationalised as having a first Scopus-indexed journal article in exactly 2001 and one in 2016-2019, with US main affiliations in their first and last articles. Researchers publishing in large teams (11+ authors) were excluded. The average field and year normalised citation impact of long- and shorter-term US researchers' journal articles decreases over time relative to the national average, with especially large falls to the last articles published that may be at least partly due to a decline in self-citations. In many cases researchers start by publishing above US average citation impact research and end by publishing below US average citation impact research. Thus, research managers should not assume that senior researchers will usually write the highest impact papers.