A career in research is becoming increasingly ‘temporary’

Scientists are now likely to have shorter, less successful careers than previous generations had, a study in the US has shown. A team based at Indiana University, Bloomington and the Georgia Institute of Technology looked at bibliographic data from principal journals in three scientific disciplines: astronomy, ecology and robotics, over the past 50 years. They used researchers’ appearance as an author on papers to work out how long they stayed in the profession, and at what level.