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These days, about half of scientists who enter a scientific discipline go on to drop out after five years, according to a study published yesterday (December 10) in PNAS. In the 1960s, that half-life for scientists was seven times longer—35 years before they moved on to other professions.
“Entering graduate students should be aware of this, so that they would have realistic expectations and perhaps try to plan their lives accordingly,” study coauthor Staša Milojevic, associate professor of informatics at Indiana University, tells Inside Higher Ed.
The researchers used data from Web of Science to follow the publishing careers of more than 100,000 scientists in astronomy, robotics, and ecology from the 1960s to the 2010s. They defined a scientist’s entry to the field as the year he or she first published in the discipline’s principal journals and a scientist’s exit as the time when three years ...
