The Kwiek/Szymula research on attrition in science, following an interview, inspired a new Index in „Harper’s Magazine”, the second-longest publishing monthly in the USA (since 1850).

The interview was in November, the new Index appears in its January 2025 issue is here:

https://harpers.org/harpers-index/

La Repubblica (Italy) discussed the results in: „Troppi i giovani che abbandonano la ricerca”. 18.10.2024. Link: https://www.repubblica.it/venerdi/2024/10/18/news/troppi_i_giovani_che_abbandonano_la_ricerca-423564157/

The Scientist was inspired and published a story: „Why Are Successful Scientists Leaving Academia Mid-Career?” 23.10.2024. Link: https://www.the-scientist.com/why-are-successful-scientists-leaving-academia-mid-career-72266

The original paper was published as “Quantifying attrition in science: a cohort-based, longitudinal study of scientists in 38 OECD countries” in  Higher Education (August 2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01284-0, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-024-01284-0#citeas or Here (PDF).

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.