Quantifying Attrition in Science: A Cohort-Based, Longitudinal Study of Scientists in 38 OECD Countries

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Autori principali: Kwiek, Marek, Szymula, Lukasz
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Kwiek, Marek
Szymula, Lukasz
author_facet Kwiek, Marek
Szymula, Lukasz
contents In this paper, we explore how members of the scientific community leave academic science and how attrition (defined as ceasing to publish) differs across genders, academic disciplines, and over time. Our approach is cohort-based and longitudinal: We track individual male and female scientists over time and quantify the phenomenon traditionally referred to as 'leaving science.' Using publication metadata from Scopus - a global bibliometric database of publications and citations - we follow the details of the publishing careers of scientists from 38 OECD countries who started publishing in 2000 (N = 142,776) and 2010 (N = 232,843). Our study is restricted to 16 STEMM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine), and we track the individual scholarly output of the two cohorts until 2022. We use survival analysis to compare attrition of men and women scientists. With more women in science and more women within cohorts, attrition is becoming ever less gendered. In addition to the combined aggregated changes at the level of all STEMM disciplines, widely nuanced changes were found to occur at the discipline level and over time. Attrition in science means different things for men versus women depending on the discipline; moreover, it means different things for scientists from different cohorts entering the scientific workforce. Finally, global bibliometric datasets were tested in the current study, opening new opportunities to explore gender and disciplinary differences in attrition.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_09425
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying Attrition in Science: A Cohort-Based, Longitudinal Study of Scientists in 38 OECD Countries
Kwiek, Marek
Szymula, Lukasz
Physics and Society
In this paper, we explore how members of the scientific community leave academic science and how attrition (defined as ceasing to publish) differs across genders, academic disciplines, and over time. Our approach is cohort-based and longitudinal: We track individual male and female scientists over time and quantify the phenomenon traditionally referred to as 'leaving science.' Using publication metadata from Scopus - a global bibliometric database of publications and citations - we follow the details of the publishing careers of scientists from 38 OECD countries who started publishing in 2000 (N = 142,776) and 2010 (N = 232,843). Our study is restricted to 16 STEMM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine), and we track the individual scholarly output of the two cohorts until 2022. We use survival analysis to compare attrition of men and women scientists. With more women in science and more women within cohorts, attrition is becoming ever less gendered. In addition to the combined aggregated changes at the level of all STEMM disciplines, widely nuanced changes were found to occur at the discipline level and over time. Attrition in science means different things for men versus women depending on the discipline; moreover, it means different things for scientists from different cohorts entering the scientific workforce. Finally, global bibliometric datasets were tested in the current study, opening new opportunities to explore gender and disciplinary differences in attrition.
title Quantifying Attrition in Science: A Cohort-Based, Longitudinal Study of Scientists in 38 OECD Countries
topic Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09425