Task specialization across research careers
- Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
- Leiden University, Netherlands
- Indiana University Bloomington, United States
- Université de Montréal, Canada
Abstract
Research careers are typically envisioned as a single path in which researchers start being one of a large number of researchers working under the guidance of one or more experienced scientists and, if they are successful, end with the individual leading their own research group and training future generations of scientists. Here we study the author contribution statements of published research papers in order to explore possible biases and disparities in career trajectories in science. We used Bayesian networks to train a prediction model based on a dataset of 70,694 publications from PLoS journals, which included 347,136 distinct authors and their associated contribution statements. This model was used to predict the contributions of 222,925 authors in 6,236,239 publications, and to apply a robust archetypal analysis to profile scientists across four career stages: junior, early-career, mid-career and late-career. All three of the archetypes we found - leader, specialized, and supporting - were encountered for early-career and mid-career researchers. Junior researchers displayed only two archetypes (specialized, and supporting), as did late-career researchers (leader and supporting). Scientists assigned to the leader and specialized archetypes tended to have longer careers than those assigned to the supporting archetype. We also observed consistent gender bias at all stages: the majority of male scientists belonged to the leader archetype, while the larger proportion of women belonged to the specialized archetype, especially for early-career and mid-career researchers.
Data availability
All data is openly accessible at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3891055
Article and author information
Author details
Nicolas Robinson-Garcia
Funding
European Commission (707404)
- Nicolas Robinson-Garcia
South African DST-NRF Centre for Excellence in Scientometrics and Science, Technology and Innovation Policy
- Rodrigo Costas
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Robinson-Garcia et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Task specialization across research careers
eLife 9:e60586.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60586
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