GoKawiilExperienced researchers are more likely to hold onto ideas from the past than those at the beginning of their careers, an analysis finds.Credit: RapidEye/Getty
Experienced researchers are less likely to produce ‘disruptive’ science than are those just starting their careers, finds an analysis of the scientific papers published by 12.5 million researchers over 60 years. The authors discovered that older researchers are better at connecting existing ideas to produce new knowledge than are younger researchers. But those with more experience are worse at achieving massive breakthroughs that overhaul, or disrupt, entire fields of research — as happened with innovations such as the discovery of the structure of DNA.
Are groundbreaking science discoveries becoming harder to find?
The analysis, which was published today in Science1, also concludes that, as their careers progress, scientists are more likely to cite older papers than newer ones. This phenomenon, which the authors call the nostalgia effect, can hold back scientific innovation, they say, because scientists get hung up on ideas from the past and are not as receptive to new developments.
The finding isn’t surprising — it aligns with previous studies documenting a decades-long global decline in disruptive science as the scientific workforce ages, says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who was not involved in the latest analysis. But it does identify a potential mechanism for the trend, he says. “Scientists become less disruptive as they age, and the scientific workforce is getting older, so the entire system is shifting toward a composition that favours consolidation [of existing ideas] over disruption,” he says.
Scientific nostalgia
To measure how disruptive a scientific paper is, the research team examined how later studies cite it. If those studies cite the paper without also citing its references — which represent previous work in a field — this suggests that the idea or discovery reported in the paper rendered older work obsolete. This is a sign of disruption, the team says.
When the authors studied a data set including the work of 12.5 million researchers who had published at least three papers between 1960 and 2020, they found that, across all fields, the probability of a researcher producing a paper among the top 10% most disruptive works decreased with their academic age — defined as the number of years since their first publication (see ‘Disruption decline’).
Source: Ref. 1
The researchers also found that the paper a scientist cites most often during their career is typically published about two years before they publish their own first paper. This suggests that “as you age, you’re still holding on to those formative years”, says Raiyan Abdul Baten, a computational social scientist at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “That hurts you in terms of moving forward and producing disruptive new work.”
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