Changing demographics of scientific careers: The rise of the temporary workforce
Changing demographics of scientific careers: The rise of the temporary workforce
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1800478115
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发表时间：
2018-12-11
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Walsh, John P.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Milojevic, Stasa;Radicchi, Filippo;Walsh, John P.
当代科学的特点是出版物呈指数增长，团队科学兴起。与此同时，授予博士学位的人数有所增加，但并没有伴随着学术职位数量的类似扩大。在这样一个竞争激烈的环境中，衡量学术成功的一个重要标准是能否保持长期活跃的科学职业生涯。在这篇论文中，我们研究了半个世纪以来三个科学学科的劳动力趋势。我们发现，所有三个学科的科学家的职业生涯都急剧缩短。队列中一半的人离开这个领域的时间已经从20世纪60年代的35年缩短到2010年代的5年。此外，我们发现，一群科学家的比例迅速上升(自20世纪60年代以来，从25%上升到60%)，他们的整个职业生涯只是支持作者，而没有领导过一份出版物。总体而言，获得完整职业生涯的入职研究人员的比例有所下降，而临时科学家的比例则有所上升。我们从一个生存模型的角度对我们的实证结果进行了解释，从这个模型中我们可以推断出科学的职业生存能力中成功的潜在因素。队列减员可以用一个相对简单的风险概率函数成功地建模。尽管我们发现生存能力和作者早期生产力之间存在显著的统计趋势，但生产率、早期工作的引文影响或初始合作水平都不能作为最终生存能力的可靠预测指标。
Contemporary science has been characterized by an exponential growth in publications and a rise of team science. At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of awarded PhD degrees, which has not been accompanied by a similar expansion in the number of academic positions. In such a competitive environment, an important measure of academic success is the ability to maintain a long active career in science. In this paper, we study workforce trends in three scientific disciplines over half a century. We find dramatic shortening of careers of scientists across all three disciplines. The time over which half of the cohort has left the field has shortened from 35 y in the 1960s to only 5 y in the 2010s. In addition, we find a rapid rise (from 25 to 60% since the 1960s) of a group of scientists who spend their entire career only as supporting authors without having led a publication. Altogether, the fraction of entering researchers who achieve full careers has diminished, while the class of temporary scientists has escalated. We provide an interpretation of our empirical results in terms of a survival model from which we infer potential factors of success in scientific career survivability. Cohort attrition can be successfully modeled by a relatively simple hazard probability function. Although we find statistically significant trends between survivability and an author's early productivity, neither productivity nor the citation impact of early work or the level of initial collaboration can serve as a reliable predictor of ultimate survivability.