MPIDS Advances: The returns to scientific specialization
MPIDS Advances
- Date: Aug 30, 2017
- Time: 02:15 PM - 03:15 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Dr. Orion Penner
- Chair of Innovation and IP Policy École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
- Location: Max-Planck-Institut für Dynamik und Selbstorganisation (MPIDS)
- Room: Prandtl Lecture Hall
- Host: MPIDS
- Contact: marco.mazza@ds.mpg.de
While it is well established that researchers specialize, the extent to which they specialize has gone largely unexamined. We have develop an approach for measuring the extent to which a researcher is specialized, and in turn, use it to quantify the returns to specialization. In this we exploit a longitu-dinal dataset of 20,000+ biomedical researchers, each starting his or her career 1975 or later. Analyz-ing this dataset we find there are significant returns to specialization - at mean career age and pub-lishing rate, a one-standard deviation increase in specialization leads to a 25 per cent increase in cita-tions. We further observe that the returns to specialization are greatest early in a researcher’s career and decrease as a researcher ages. Similarly, returns are greater when publishing at a lower rate and decrease at higher rates of publishing.