Researchers: Age Has No Impact on One's Odds of Scientific Success

American inventor Thomas Edison at work in his laboratory in 1917 (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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If there’s one thing we can all agree on these days, it’s that we love our data—and nobody loves it more than scientists. Looking to figure out why some scientists have successful careers, in analyzing a cross-section of the industry, researchers determined that age has no bearing on one’s odds of success.

In the study, whose results were published in November in Science Today, researchers reviewed the publications of 2,887 physicists, as well as a blend of career profiles and data from online research platforms Google Scholar and Web of Science, respectively. Given that success in the sciences is determined largely by the influence of a scientist’s publications, the researchers were trying to locate patterns in the timing of a scientist’s highest-impact papers. It turns out there were none. In fact, the timing is entirely random.

The publication history of two Nobel laureates, Frank A. Wilczek (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2004) and John B. Fenn (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2002), illustrating that the highest-impact work can be, with the same probability, anywhere in the sequence of papers published by a scientist. Each vertical line corresponds to a research paper. The height of each line corresponds to paper impact, quantified with the number of citations the paper received after 10 years. Wilczek won the Nobel Prize for the very first paper he published, whereas Fenn published his Nobel-awarded work late in his career, after he was forcefully retired by Yale. (Sinatra, et. al.)

That said, the process of scientists creating high-impact studies is far from arbitrary. Through their findings, the group of researchers created a model to pull back the curtain on the role of luck and productivity in one’s career. While the markers for future success were specific to each individual, the study claims its model can be used to predict when a scientist will enjoy future achievements. Even more impressive, the researchers say they can do it using just 10 papers.

The prediction is based on what the group called the “Q Value,” a metric factoring in the number of publications produced and the amount of citations given, thus determining the consistency of a scientist’s impact. This means if the Q Value of a biologist (or any other “-ist,” for that matter) were low at the beginning of his or her career, then the individual would likely never produce any high-impact research.

There are two things to keep in mind, though: First, the study doesn’t articulate what determines somebody’s Q Value, since the scientists don’t know (they only calculated for it); and second, an individual’s Q Value is not necessarily an indication of their scientific prowess, only the impact of their studies.

The researchers created a website that visualizes the career path of those scientists that were studied, and for lack of a better word, its “psychedelic” (see example below). View it by clicking here.

This set of visualizations represents the career of a scientist as a line, where each bump represents the impact (number of citations) of a paper. The larger the bump, the bigger the impact. When looking at thousands of these lines we see that success is randomly distributed within careers – the highest impact publication could be the first publication, could appear mid-career or could be a scientist’s last publication. This random impact rule holds true for scientists who work alone, in groups, in different disciplines, in different decades, and for different lengths of time. (Image by Kim Albrecht, data image by Roberta Sinatra)