Understanding how institutional changes within academia may affect the overall potential of science requires a better quantitative representation of how careers evolve over time. Since knowledge spillovers, cumulative advantage, competition, and collaboration are distinctive features of the academic profession, both the employment relationship and the procedures for assigning recognition and allocating funding should be designed to account for these factors. We study the annual production n_{i}(t) of a given scientist i by analyzing longitudinal career data for 200 leading scientists and 100 assistant professors from the physics community. We compare our results with 21,156 sports careers. Our empirical analysis of individual productivity dynamics shows that (i) there are increasing returns for the top individuals within the competitive cohort, and that (ii) the distribution of production growth is a leptokurtic "tent-shaped" distribution that is remarkably symmetric. Our methodology is general, and we speculate that similar features appear in other disciplines where academic publication is essential and collaboration is a key feature. We introduce a model of proportional growth which reproduces these two observations, and additionally accounts for the significantly right-skewed distributions of career longevity and achievement in science. Using this theoretical model, we show that short-term contracts can amplify the effects of competition and uncertainty making careers more vulnerable to early termination, not necessarily due to lack of individual talent and persistence, but because of random negative production shocks. We show that fluctuations in scientific production are quantitatively related to a scientist's collaboration radius and team efficiency.
A Case Study of Gender Bias at the Postdoctoral Level in Physics, and its Resulting Impact on the Academic Career Advancement of Females
这个典型的美国粒子物理实验的案例研究探讨了性别偏见的问题，以及它如何影响女性在博士后水平以外的物理学领域的学术职业发展前景;我们使用公共数据库来研究Run II Dzero实验中57名前博士后研究人员的整个队列的职业道路，以检查男性和女性是否在性别上被对待-盲目地进行实验。研究发现，女性研究人员的平均生产力明显高于男性同行，但根据其生产力，仅分配了会议演讲量的1/3。研究还发现，在分配会议发言的显着性别偏见似乎有显着的负面影响，对女性的学术生涯的发展。作者拥有粒子物理学博士学位，并作为博士后研究科学家工作了六年，其中五年在费米实验室合作。她目前正在攻读统计学研究生学位。
Complexity Science Hub Vienna（维也纳复杂性科学中心）；Central European University（中欧大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨工业大学）
The Distribution of the Asymptotic Number of Citations to Sets of Publications by a Researcher or From an Academic Department Are Consistent With a Discrete Lognormal Model
