Early-career setback and future career impact

Yang Wang; Benjamin F. Jones; Dashun Wang

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-12189-3

Early-career setback and future career impact

Yang Wang, Benjamin F. Jones, Dashun Wang^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

82 Scopus citations

Abstract

Setbacks are an integral part of a scientific career, yet little is known about their long-term effects. Here we examine junior scientists applying for National Institutes of Health R01 grants. By focusing on proposals fell just below and just above the funding threshold, we compare near-miss with narrow-win applicants, and find that an early-career setback has powerful, opposing effects. On the one hand, it significantly increases attrition, predicting more than a 10% chance of disappearing permanently from the NIH system. Yet, despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run. Moreover, this performance advantage seems to go beyond a screening mechanism, suggesting early-career setback appears to cause a performance improvement among those who persevere. Overall, these findings are consistent with the concept that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” which may have broad implications for identifying, training and nurturing junior scientists.

Original language	English (US)
Article number	4331
Journal	Nature communications
Volume	10
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12189-3
State	Published - Dec 1 2019

Funding

The authors thank A.-L. Barab\u00E1si, J. Chown, J. Evans, E. Finkel, V. Medvec, J. Loscalzo, W. Ocasio, P. Stephan, B. Uzzi, Y. Yin, and all members of Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) for invaluable comments. This work is supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA9550-15-1-0162, FA9550-17-1-0089, and FA9550-19-1-0354, Northwestern University\u2019s Data Science Initiative, the National Science Foundation grant SBE 1829344, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award G-2015-14014. This work does not reflect the position of NIH. Together, these results demonstrate that over the course of ten years, near misses had fewer initial grants from the NIH and NSF. Yet they ultimately published as many papers and, most surprisingly, produced work that garnered substantially higher impacts than their narrow-win counterparts.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

General Chemistry
General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
General Physics and Astronomy

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10.1038/s41467-019-12189-3

Cite this

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Early-career setback and future career impact

Abstract

Funding

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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