Study claims scientists attain their creative zenith early in their careers

According to the results of a recent study, scientists are most creative and innovative in their early careers.

The results reported in the Journal of Human Resources demonstrated that, on one crucial metric, the impact of published work by biomedical professionals decreases by half to two-thirds throughout the course of their careers.

Bruce Weinberg, an economist at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study, said, "That's a huge decline in impact."

"We found that as they get older, the work of biomedical scientists was just not as innovative and impactful."

The causes behind this trend of decreased innovation, however, make the findings more complex and highlight the need to continue supporting scientists later in their careers, according to Weinberg.

For nearly 150 years, researchers have been examining the connection between age or experience and innovation, but no clear conclusion has been reached. In reality, according to Weinberg, the results have been "all over the map."

"For a topic that so many people with so many approaches have studied for so long, it is pretty remarkable that we still don't have a conclusive answer."

The fact that the authors of this study had access to a sizable dataset of 5.6 million biomedical science publications that were published over a 30-year period, from 1980 to 2009, and gathered by MEDLINE, was one of its advantages. These data contain comprehensive author information.

The number of times other scientists "cited" (or "cited") a study in their own work was used in this new study to gauge how inventive the biomedical scientists' articles were. A study's significance is deemed to increase with the number of times it is cited.

The researchers in this study were able to analyse how frequently scientists' work was mentioned early in their careers compared to later in their careers since they had thorough information on the authors of each piece.

Weinberg and his coworkers discovered something when analysing the data that was essential to understanding how innovation varies over the course of a career.

They discovered that early-career scientists who were the least inventive tended to leave the field and stop publishing new findings. It was the most important and productive group of young researchers who were still publishing research 20 or 30 years later.

"Early in their careers, scientists show a wide range of innovativeness. But over time, we see selective attrition of the people who are less innovative," Weinberg said.

"So when you look at all biomedical scientists as a group, it doesn't look like innovation is declining over time. But the fact that the least innovative researchers are dropping out when they are relatively young disguises the fact that, for any one person, innovativeness tends to decline over their career."

The findings showed that, on average, a researcher's late-career scientific publication received one-half to two-thirds fewer citations than their earlier work.

However, there are other indications that researchers were less inventive later in their careers outside citation counts.

"We constructed additional metrics that captured the breadth of an article's impact based on the range of fields that cite it, whether the article is employing the best and latest ideas, citing the best and latest research, and whether the article is drawing from multiple disciplines," said Huifeng Yu, a co-author, who worked on the study as a PhD student at the University at Albany, SUNY.

"These other metrics also lead to the same conclusion about declining innovativeness."

According to Weinberg, the findings indicating selective attrition among less inventive scientists may assist to explain why earlier studies produced such contrasting outcomes.

Studies with Nobel laureates and other distinguished scholars, whose attrition rates are often low, tend to discover earlier innovation peak ages. Studies with a larger sample size of scientists, however, typically do not detect an early peak in creativity because attrition is not taken into account.

According to Weinberg, attrition in the scientific community may not be only related to innovation. Although this study is unable to quantify the impact, women and members of underrepresented minorities in science may not have had access to the opportunities they required to succeed.

"Those scientists who succeeded probably did so through a combination of talent, luck, personal background and prior training," he said.

The findings imply that funding agencies for scientists must strike a fine balance between promoting inexperience and experience.

Young scientists are typically at the height of their creativity, although there is a wide range, with some being far more inventive than others. Gerald Marschke, the co-author of the study and associate professor of economics at the University at Albany, warned that you might not be funding the best researchers.

Gerald added, "With older, more experienced scientists, you are getting the ones who have stood the test of time, but who on average are not at their best anymore."

( With inputs from ANI )

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