A new paper by Marek Kwiek and Lukasz Szymula was just published in “Higher Education”: “Quantifying attrition in science: a cohort-based, longitudinal study of scientists in 38 OECD countries“.
Kwiek, M., Szymula, L. Quantifying attrition in science: a cohort-based, longitudinal study of scientists in 38 OECD countries. High Educ 89, 1465–1493 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01284-0
The article is here (Open Access).
The paper raised huge interest globally and was discussed in 15 languages in 50 outlets, including more than 30 in China.
The paper in its online-first version was the most downloadable paper in “Higher Education” from 2024, from 2021-2024 and in the history of “Higher Education” journal (currently 34,000 downloads).
Abstract:
In this paper, we explore how members of the scientific community leave academic science and how attrition (defined as ceasing to publish) differs across genders, academic disciplines, and over time. Our approach is cohort-based and longitudinal: We track individual male and female scientists over time and quantify the phenomenon traditionally referred to as “leaving science.” Using publication metadata from Scopus—a global bibliometric database of publications and citations—we follow the details of the publishing careers of scientists from 38 OECD countries who started publishing in 2000 (N = 142,776) and 2010 (N = 232,843). Our study is restricted to 16 STEMM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine), and we track the individual scholarly output of the two cohorts until 2022. We use survival analysis to compare attrition of men and women scientists. With more women in science and more women within cohorts, attrition is becoming ever less gendered. In addition to the combined aggregated changes at the level of all STEMM disciplines, widely nuanced changes were found to occur at the discipline level and over time. Attrition in science means different things for men versus women depending on the discipline; moreover, it means different things for scientists from different cohorts entering the scientific workforce. Finally, global bibliometric datasets were tested in the current study, opening new opportunities to explore gender and disciplinary differences in attrition.
