Scientists produce more novel but less disruptive work as they age
Analysis poses tough questions on who should receive more funding – younger researchers or older ones?
Researchers produce more novel work as they age, according to a new analysis of the citation patterns of more than 12.5 million scientists who published three or more scholarly works between 1960 and 2020. But they are less likely to produce disruptive research because they are building on their existing body of work, rather than pursuing new lines of research, says study co-author Lingfei Wu, who is an information scientist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.