Publish or Perish

Striking the right balance between youth and experience

“…Other notable examples include the diverse initiatives by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support young scientists in gaining access to Research Project Grants (R01), for instance through the NIH's Early Stage Investigator Policy (see https://grants.nih.gov/policy/ early-stage/policy), and by establishing quotas (Kaiser, 2008) However, the gap continues to grow. The number of NIH-funded researchers aged 56 years or older is now nearly double the number who are 40 years or younger (Yu et al, 2022), throwing into sharp focus the challenges at hand-especially given the substantial increases in PhD graduates (Alberts et al, 2014). The upward shifts in median age can only be partly explained by demographic changes: In the United States, mandatory retirement in universities was eliminated in 1994, which led to more scientists sustaining careers into their late 60s The study, carried out by Marek Kwiek and Lukasz Szymula at the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan, Poland, used structured Scopus data on five million scientists based in OECD countries and measured academic age as the "median time elapsed since first publication".…”

“…Nevertheless, despite decades and even centuries of studies into the matter, there is no clear consensus on the exact interrelationships between scientific creativity and productivity on the one hand, and age and experience on the other. The median age of the scientific workforce is increasing (Yu et al , 2022), and this raises important questions about scientific innovation and creativity, the opportunities afforded to researchers at different career stages, and the structure of academic systems.…”

“…For example, in the United States, the average age of researchers has been increasing at a rate higher than most other professions, prompting concerns that, rather than freeing up opportunities for younger researchers, this might instead limit grant funding and promotions (Packalen & Bhattacharya, 2019). The proportion of scientists aged 55 years and older nearly doubled between 1993 and 2008 (Blau & Weinberg, 2017), while the average age of recipients receiving their first NIH grant has increased from 40 to 44 years over the past 25 years (Yu et al , 2022).…”

Invention and the Life Course: Age Differences in Patenting

“…Packalen and Bhattacharya (2015) find that scientific papers with a young first author and a more experienced last author are more likely to try out newer ideas than papers published by other age configurations. More recently, Yu, et al (2019) look at the citations received by a large number of papers in health sciences as a function of the 'career age' of the first and last authors. They find the typical 'inverted-U' in the raw data, but steadily declining 'quality' with age once author fixed effects were used to control for unobservable inventor characteristics.…”

“…Most of this work is cross-sectional, looking at the age distribution of creators within samples of achievements. Such analysis confounds how the abilities of individuals change over their life with selection into and out of the creative activity (Yu, et al 2019). By looking at 3 million patents associated with 1.4 million inventors over the period 1976-2018, we can complement cross-sectional comparisons with fixed-effects estimation that mitigates selection issues.…”