Older scientists are less likely than their younger colleagues to try out new ideas, an analysis of authors of research papers has found.
The work was conducted by Mikko Packalen, an economist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and Jay Bhattacharya, a health economist at Stanford University in the United States, and is published this month by the US National Bureau of Economic Research as a working paper.
The paper says that the probability of a scientist trying out novel research ideas declines as the years pass since they completed their PhD.
Packalen and Bhattacharya suggest in the paper that this finding should encourage funders and the managers of research institutions to support early-career researchers because of their ability to bring scientific novelty to projects.
The value of tenure should also be reconsidered, the authors say. Tenured scientists are generally expected to be more willing to explore novel or controversial scientific questions because they have job security, but Packalen and Bhattacharya found “no support for this traditional argument in the data”.
The authors analysed all published articles in biomedicine since 1946 using the Medline database. For each paper, they determined how new the ideas were and the career stage of each author, defined by how many years had passed since the author’s first published paper.
Their most striking discovery was that the career age of the first author plays the most significant role in determining the likelihood that the project will be scientifically novel. If the first author is in the first decade of his or her career, the chance of a paper trying out newer ideas is greatest—almost regardless of the career age of the last author, who is often a more senior researcher. However, last authors also have a high probability of trying new ideas—but only if their first author is an early-career researcher.
“You do need to listen to the more experienced researchers in guiding your research,” says Packalen. “But let them weed out the worst ideas; do not let them set your agenda.”
He says he hopes that, as a researcher, he can continue to try out new ideas even when he becomes a veteran. “But statistically speaking it’s probably more likely that I won’t—I have to keep this in mind! You have to keep thinking.”
The authors say in their paper that Charles Darwin and Max Planck considered older scientists in their fields to be particularly unreceptive to their ground-breaking ideas.
This article also appeared in Research Fortnight