Nearly 50% of the world's researchers leave science after 10 years

A study of 38 countries found that one-third of researchers leave science within five years of publishing their first paper, and nearly half within a decade.

Of the more than 140,000 scientists who started their careers in 2000, less than half were still publishing research 15 years later - Source: Higher Education

This information was published in the journal Nature in early October 2024. The data for this article was analyzed from research published in the journal Higher Education .

The study was conducted on nearly 400,000 scientists in 38 countries, using the Scopus citation database to track scientists' academic publishing careers.

The researchers tracked the publishing careers of two groups: 142,776 scientists (including 52,115 women) who began publishing in 2000 and 232,843 scientists (including 97,145 women) who began publishing in 2010.

Scientists are based in countries including the United States, Japan, South Korea and countries across Europe and they represent 16 scientific disciplines.

The study found that within five years, one-third of the scientists in the 2000 cohort had stopped publishing. That number rose to about half within ten years and nearly two-thirds by 2019.

Women are more likely than men to leave science, about 12% after five or 10 years. By 2019, only 29% of women in the group were still publishing scientific papers, compared with nearly 34% of men.

The 2010 cohort showed a narrower gender gap: nine years after the first paper, about 41% of women and 42% of men were still publishing.

The reasons why researchers leave science after 5 or 10 years of publishing their first scientific paper have not been detailed in the scope of this study. The researchers believe that it is necessary to interview researchers who leave science to know the exact reasons.

However, the authors also put forward a number of hypotheses about why researchers leave science. Notably, there is a gender bias, with women not being recognized as research collaborators in published articles. There are also reasons such as researchers moving to a less research-focused institution or changing jobs.

In a 2023 study, White-Lewis and colleagues analyzed the decisions to leave of 773 faculty members at US academic institutions from 2015 to 2019 and found that family reasons, employment status, and salary were important drivers of decisions to leave.

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/gan-50-nha-nghien-cuu-the-gioi-roi-bo-khoa-hoc-sau-10-nam-2024110410593647.htm