PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Yu, Huifeng
AU  - Marschke, Gerald
AU  - Ross, Matthew B.
AU  - Staudt, Joseph
AU  - Weinberg, Bruce A.
TI  - Publish or Perish
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.59.2.1219-10630R1
DP  - 2023 Jul 01
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 1307--1346
VI  - 58
IP  - 4
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/58/4/1307.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/58/4/1307.full
SO  - J Hum Resour2023 Jul 01; 58
AB  - Studying 5.6 million biomedical science articles published over three decades, we reconcile conflicts in a long-standing 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.