'Dropout' rate for academic scientists has risen sharply in past 50 years, IU study finds: News at IU: Indiana University

Authored by news.iu.edu and submitted by mvea
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BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Half of the people pursuing careers as scientists at higher education institutions will drop out of the field after five years, according to a new analysis from researchers at Indiana University Bloomington.

That number contrasts sharply with the departure rate of scientists in the 1960s, when a much higher fraction spent their full careers in academia. Back then, it took 35 years for half of the people entering the field at the same time to drop out.

The statistics come from a study published today in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that tracked more than 100,000 scientific careers over 50 years to also reveal a steadily growing "temporary workforce" of lab technicians, research associates, postdoctoral researchers and other supporting scientists.

"Between 1960 and 2010, we found the number of scientists who spent their entire career in academia as supporting scientists -- rather than a faculty scientist -- has risen from 25 percent to 60 percent," said Staša Milojević, an associate professor in the IU School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, who led the study. "There seems to be a broad trend across fields in science: It's increasingly a revolving door."

The study's findings come from tracking tens of thousands of individual names listed as authors in top academic journals over the past half century. In addition to the sharp drop in career life span, the analysis revealed a 35-percentage-point rise in the number of scientists who are never credited as a study's primary author.

In a field where career advancement often depends on the axiom of "publish or perish," Milojević said, the sharp rise in researchers who never lead a publication is striking.

"Academia isn't really set up to provide supporting scientists with long-term career opportunities," she said. "A lot of this work used to be performed by graduate students, but now it's typical to hire a 'postdoc' -- a position that practically didn't exist in the U.S. until the 1950s but has since become a virtual prerequisite for faculty positions in many fields.

"You can keep moving from postdoc to postdoc -- or you might get hired as a research scientist -- but there really isn't a lot of job security. It's a difficult position to survive in."

Chris11246 on December 11st, 2018 at 05:19 UTC »

Why don't these new scientists want to work overtime for crappy pay while under the threat of publish or perish?

Viroplast on December 11st, 2018 at 04:41 UTC »

As someone who's in the process of choosing between academia and industry, the academic path just has too many drawbacks. As a scientist, I want to do science. Many of the PIs around me don't do science. They write grants, teach, start companies/sit on boards for free cash, and delegate tasks. But the PI who is actually the innovating force behind their lab's work (as opposed to the students and postdocs) is becoming somewhat of a rarity. And that breaches into a separate and obvious moral dilemma when PIs are getting most of the credit for the work that comes out of their labs (in terms of awards, publications, academic leverage, etc).

On top of that, job security from tenure just isn't really an incentive any more once you acquire a valuable set of skills. Industry has its own set of problems, of course, but I just don't really see academia as an attractive track any more in large part because it's diverged from what it used to be, and I think many people think the same way.

mvea on December 11st, 2018 at 03:26 UTC »

The title of the post is a copy and paste from the title and first paragraph of the linked academic press release here:

'Dropout' rate for academic scientists has risen sharply in past 50 years, IU study finds

Half of the people pursuing careers as scientists at higher education institutions will drop out of the field after five years, according to a new analysis from researchers at Indiana University Bloomington.

Journal Reference:

Staša Milojević, Filippo Radicchi, and John P. Walsh.

Changing demographics of scientific careers: The rise of the temporary workforce.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1800478115

Link: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/12/05/1800478115

Abstract

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.