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Updated: May 23, 2026
09:07
Experimental Research Examining How People Can Cope with Uncertainty Through Soft Haptic Sensations
Published on: September 16, 2015
Persistence and uncertainty in the academic career
Alexander M Petersen1, Massimo Riccaboni, H Eugene Stanley
1Laboratory for the Analysis of Complex Economic Systems, Institutions Markets Technologies (IMT) Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, 55100 Lucca, Italy. alexander.petersen@imtlucca.it
Summary
Academic career paths show increasing returns for top scientists and a symmetric, tent-shaped production growth distribution. This quantitative analysis impacts understanding of scientific productivity and career longevity.
Area of Science:
- Quantitative analysis of scientific careers
- Academic career dynamics in physics
Background:
- Understanding institutional impacts on scientific potential requires quantitative career evolution models.
- Academic careers feature knowledge spillovers, cumulative advantage, competition, and collaboration, necessitating tailored employment and funding structures.
Purpose of the Study:
- To quantitatively represent how academic careers evolve over time.
- To analyze individual productivity dynamics and their relationship to career longevity and achievement.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of longitudinal career data for 200 leading scientists and 100 assistant professors in physics.
- Development of a proportional growth model to reproduce observed productivity dynamics.
Main Results:
- Empirical analysis revealed increasing returns for top individuals within competitive cohorts.
- Scientific production growth distribution is leptokurtic, tent-shaped, and symmetric.
- Model accounts for right-skewed career longevity and achievement distributions.
Conclusions:
- Short-term contracts can exacerbate competition and uncertainty, increasing career vulnerability to early termination due to random negative shocks.
- Scientific production fluctuations correlate with collaboration radius and team efficiency.
- Methodology is generalizable to other disciplines reliant on publication and collaboration.
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