Publish or Perish: Explaining Patterns in Innovation over the Career

Here we make available for anyone to use our database described in Yu et al., forthcoming*. Yu et al. study the productivity of biomedical scientists over their careers, distinguishing between scholarly quantity and quality and also controlling for ability-biased attrition. They find that while research quality declines monotonically over the career, this decline is easily overlooked in quantitative analyses of life-cycle productivity because higher “ability” scientists have longer publishing careers. These results have implications for broader questions of human capital accumulation over the career and federal research policies.

The results in the paper are from an analysis of 5.6 million publications from PubMed that have been matched to Clarivate’s Analytics' Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) database. All programs and data files necessary to produce the results are archived here. We include two reference files. “Programs and data files guide.pdf” is a guide to the archived programs and data files. “Data dictionary.xlsx” is a data dictionary.

Some of the micro-level raw data upon which the results of this study are based were obtained under license from Clarivate Analytics . Most of our data can be redistributed, but our citation metrics which come from Clarivate Analytics’ Science Citation Index Expanded, are proprietary, and according to the terms of our license with Clarivate cannot be redistributed in their entirety. These metrics have been removed from our data files. Fortunately, we do make available here all text-based metrics. Readers can contact Jeffrey Clovis (IP&Science) for information on obtaining the same micro-level raw data that we have.

*Yu, H.; Marschke, G.; Ross, M.; Staudt, J.; and Weinberg, B. "Publish or Perish: Selective Attrition as a Unifying Explanation for Patterns in Innovation over the Career," Journal of Human Resources, in press.