Cautious explorers generate more future academic impact

TL;DR

This study identifies that scientists who cautiously explore nearby research topics early in their careers tend to achieve higher future impact, highlighting the importance of balanced exploration and exploitation strategies.

Contribution

It introduces new metrics for measuring research exploration and exploitation, revealing early career traits linked to future scientific success.

Findings

Cautious explorers with frequent, nearby topic switches outperform others in future impact.

Balancing exploration and exploitation in early career stages increases citation counts by up to 19%.

Metrics can identify promising scientists early in their careers.

Abstract

Some scientists are more likely to explore unfamiliar research topics while others tend to exploit existing ones. In previous work, correlations have been found between scientists' topic choices and their career performances. However, literature has yet to untangle the intricate interplay between scientific impact and research topic choices, where scientific exploration and exploitation intertwine. Here we study two metrics that gauge how frequently scientists switch topic areas and how large those jumps are, and discover that 'cautious explorers' who switch topics frequently but do so to 'close' domains have notably better future performance and can be identified at a remarkably early career stage. Cautious explorers who balance exploration and exploitation in their first four career years have up to 19% more citations per future paper. Our results suggest that the proposed metrics depict the scholarly traits of scientists throughout their careers and provide fresh insight, especially for nurturing junior scientists.