Quantifying Lifetime Productivity Changes: A Longitudinal Study of 320,000 Late-Career Scientists

TL;DR

This study analyzes the career-long research productivity of over 320,000 late-career scientists across multiple disciplines and countries, revealing high career stability and minimal radical mobility in productivity levels.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale longitudinal bibliometric dataset and provides new insights into career persistence and mobility patterns among late-career scientists.

Findings

Half of top performers remain top performers over time.

One-third of bottom performers stay in the bottom decile.

Radical shifts in productivity classes are extremely rare.

Abstract

The present study focuses on persistence in research productivity over the course of an individual's entire scientific career. We track 'late-career' scientists - scientists with at least 25 years of publishing experience (N=320,564) - in 16 STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) and social science disciplines from 38 OECD countries for up to five decades. Our OECD sample includes 79.42% of late-career scientists globally. We examine the details of their mobility patterns as early-career, mid-career, and late-career scientists between decile-based productivity classes, from the bottom 10% to top 10% of the productivity distribution. Methodologically, we turn a large-scale bibliometric dataset (Scopus raw data) into a comprehensive, longitudinal data source for research on careers in science. The global science system is highly immobile: half of global top performers continue their careers as top performers and one-third of global bottom performers as bottom performers. Jumpers-Up and Droppers-Down are extremely rare in science. The chances of moving radically up or down in productivity classes are marginal (1% or less). Our regression analyses show that productivity classes are highly path dependent: there is a single most important predictor of being a top performer, which is being a top performer at an earlier career stage.