PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Huifeng Yu
AU  - Gerald Marschke
AU  - Matthew B. Ross
AU  - Joseph Staudt
AU  - Bruce Weinberg
TI  - Publish or Perish: Selective Attrition as a Unifying Explanation for Patterns in Innovation over the Career
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.59.2.1219-10630R1
DP  - 2022 Oct 07
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 1219-10630R1
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2022/10/03/jhr.59.2.1219-10630R1.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2022/10/03/jhr.59.2.1219-10630R1.full
AB  - Studying 5.6 million biomedical science articles published over three decades, we reconcile conflicts in a longstanding interdisciplinary literature on scientists’ life-cycle productivity by controlling for selective attrition and distinguishing between research quantity and quality. While research quality declines monotonically over the career, this decline is easily overlooked because higher “ability” authors have longer publishing careers. Our results have implications for broader questions of human capital accumulation over the career and federal research policies that shift funding to early-career researchers – while funding researchers at their most creative, these policies must be undertaken carefully because young researchers are less “able” on average.