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Nearly 50% of Scientists Give Up Research Within Ten Years, Large Study Shows
A study shows that almost 50% of scientists quit research within ten years, with women more affected.
Nearly 50% of Scientists Give Up Research Within Ten Years, Large Study Shows
A study of nearly 400,000 scientists from 38 countries shows that a third of them leave academia within five years of publishing their first paper, and almost half within a decade.
The analysis, published in Higher education, used data from the Scopus citation database to track scientists' academic career trajectories - an indicator of how active they are in research. Overall, the study found that women were more likely than men to stop publishing, although the magnitude of this difference varied across disciplines.
“We have always thought about and known about people leaving academia, but the extent to which this happens was somehow unknown to us,” says Marek Kwiek, co-author of the study and a researcher in academic careers at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland.
The study represents the largest attempt yet to quantify the number of people leaving science - previous studies have been limited in scope and focused primarily on scientists in the United States.
“When you have big data like this, it becomes more forceful to acknowledge that this is a problem,” says Joya Misra, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who studies gender issues and inequality in science.
Leaving the laboratory
Kwiek and his colleagues tracked the publishing careers of two groups: 142,776 scientists (including 52,115 women) who started publishing in 2000 and 232,843 scientists (97,145 women) who started publishing in 2010.
The scientists came from countries such as the United States, Japan, South Korea and various European nations and represented 16 scientific disciplines.
The study found that within five years, a third of all scientists in the 2000 group had stopped publishing. This increased to about half within ten years and to almost two-thirds by 2019 (see “Academic Exodus”). Women were about 12% more likely than men to leave academia after five or ten years. As of 2019, only 29% of women in this group were still publishing, while nearly 34% of men were.
The 2010 group showed a narrower gender gap: about 41% of women and 42% of men continued to publish nine years after their first publication. This improvement is promising, says Damani White-Lewis, a researcher in higher education and academic careers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “It’s always good to know when we’re making progress because we need to be able to replicate these things.”
However, in some scientific disciplines - particularly in the life sciences - there were striking differences between men and women. For example, women in biology had a 58% chance of leaving science after ten years; for men it was almost 49%.
In contrast, women in physics were nearly as likely to leave after ten years (about 48%) as men (47%). There were also hardly any gender differences for mathematics, engineering and computer science - all areas in which women tend to be underrepresented.
The findings “draw necessary and important attention to the ways we promote access, success and retention in research,” says White-Lewis.
Reasons for leaving
Misra points out that the actual gender differences may be larger than the publication data suggests. "Often women are not recognized as collaborators in published works, and therefore we tend to be underrepresented in the published works. There is also some bias. We don't know exactly who should have been listed as an author on the works," she says.
And while the study offers some insight into where and when scientists leave the profession, it doesn't explain why.
There are several factors, beyond leaving research entirely, that could explain why scientists stop publishing, such as moving to a less research-oriented institution, entering industry, or moving to an administrative role. “We don’t know 100% what happened to the people,” says Misra. “We can’t know without interviews and surveys,” adds Kwiek.
In a 2023 study, White-Lewis and his colleagues analyzed the departure decisions of 773 faculty members in U.S. universities between 2015 and 2019 and found that family reasons, tenure status and salary were the significant factors in the decisions to leave.
In future studies, Kwiek plans to conduct large-scale surveys and use artificial intelligence chatbots for interviews to explore reasons for leaving the profession.
“It would be interesting to combine the Scopus data with institutional data,” such as: B. Exit surveys to better understand why scientists leave academic careers,” says White-Lewis.
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Kwiek, M. & Szymula, L. High. Educ. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01284-0 (2024).
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White-Lewis, D. K., O'Meara, K., Mathews, K. & Havey, N. Res. High. Educ. 64, 473–494 (2023).