Earlier this year, two academics from Concordia University in Canada made waves with a paper claiming that age negatively affects the quality of researchers’ publications. The paper, “”, published in the journal Scientometrics, reported that the number of citations attracted by papers published by Canadian scientists and engineers tends to decline over time. It also found that productivity of papers relative to funding levels tends to peak about 12 years after publication of a researcher’s first paper.
“Considering the fact that funding is usually more biased towards senior researchers, we need to…highlight the importance of more equal funding distribution among young and senior researchers,” the paper concludes.
This echoes the complaint made last year by Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt, the vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, that institutions direct most of their money to academics over the age of 50 even though the “apex of productivity” for researchers is usually far earlier.
But not everyone agrees. Here, five senior scientists reflect on both the wider data and their own experiences of when – if at all – the academic golden years end.
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The key to scientific productivity is not age but motivation and ability
That science is a young person’s game is considered a truism. Albert Einstein, who published the work for which he received the Nobel prize at age 26, is supposed to have remarked: “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” Another Nobel laureate, the University of Chicago economist Gary Becker, in 2008: “Significant advances not only in mathematics, but also in biology (such as Crick and Watson), in economics, and even in humanities have typically been made by younger rather than older persons.”
The general acceptance of this belief led to dire warnings that the abolition of compulsory retirement at US universities in 1994 would decrease research productivity. In a , Sally Rockey, then deputy director of the National Institutes of Health – the major US funding agency for biomedical research – even proposed setting up an “emeritus award”: a financial incentive for older scientists to stop conducting research.
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Like so many truisms, the belief that science is advanced mainly by young innovators is wrong. When age has an effect, it is the middle-aged, rather than the young, who are most creative. This was by Benjamin Jones and Bruce Weinberg in an analysis of the ages at which Nobel laureates did their award-winning research. In a paper, “”, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they reported that the average age of those making their great achievements was 37.5 in physics, 40.2 in chemistry and 39.9 in medicine. Only 7 per cent of Nobel laureates were younger than 30 when they did the research for which they won their prize.
A similar pattern has been found in studies using measures of scientific productivity, such as the average number of articles published or citations garnered. Dean Simonton, an expert on determinants of scientific creativity, argued in a 1997 paper, “”, published in Psychological Review, that citations are the best single measure of scientific creativity and correlate highly with both ratings of scientific eminence by peers and the receipt of professional honours such as Nobel prizes and US National Medals of Science. Since the number of publications and the number of citations are highly correlated, quality of output – that is, creativity – is a positive function of quantity.
Figure 1, below, shows the finding of a classic study by Stephen Cole, published in 1979 in the American Journal of Sociology. In a paper titled “”, he compared the publication and citation rates of 2,460 scientists of different ages and from six different disciplines between 1965 and 1969. The pattern he found is typical of the many studies of that period, with productivity and creativity peaking at age 40 to 44.
The consistency of these findings probably accounts for the fact that few studies have been conducted more recently. But this is unfortunate, because in the past few decades the academic job market has become much more competitive and publication pressure has increased. Both are likely to have increased publication rates of scientists of all ages.
Source: Figure 1 adapted from “Age and scientific performance” by S. Cole, 1979, American Journal of Sociology. Figure 2 reprinted with permission from “Does the aging of tenured academic staff affect the research performance of universities?” by S. Kyvik and T.?B. Olsen, 2008, Scientometrics, 76 (Springer).
The clearest demonstration that changes in the incentive system can have a more powerful impact than age on publication rates comes from studies conducted in Norway. In an article called “Does the aging of tenured academic staff affect the research performance of universities?”, published in Scientometrics in 2008, Svein Kyvik and Terje Bruen Olsen reported the findings of three surveys of academic staff at Norwegian universities between 1980 and 2000 (see Figure 2, above). Whereas the earlier surveys show a typical peak in output at ages 45 to 49, the peak had disappeared by 1998.
In a 2015 paper in Studies in Higher Education, titled “”, Kyvik and Dag Aksnes estimated that there had been a 30 per cent rise in the number of papers published across all age cohorts during the past two decades. And two surveys that were conducted between 2005 and 2007 and 2011 and 2013, using a newly instituted database with complete coverage of all Norwegian scientific publications, suggested a further 24 per cent increase (although because the number of authors of Norwegian journal articles doubled between 1981 and 2012, part of the increase in productivity is likely to be a result of the greater incidence of research collaboration).
Additional evidence on the importance of motivation comes from a recent study of more than 6,000 Quebec scientists published in 2008 by Yves Gingras and colleagues in Plos One. Their paper, “”, examines average pr