Nearly 50% of researchers quit science within a decade, huge study reveals
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Publishing data can help to reveal how many scientists choose to leave research and pursue another career. Credit: Christian Guiton/Getty
A study of nearly 400,000 scientists across 38 countries finds that one-third of them quit science within five years of authoring their first paper, and almost half leave within a decade.
The analysis, published in Higher Education1, used data from the citation database Scopus to track scientists’ scholarly publishing careers — a proxy for how active they are in research. It found that, overall, women were more likely than men to stop publishing, but the size of this difference varied between disciplines.
“We have always been thinking and knowing that people leave science, but the scale of leaving science was somehow unknown,” says study co-author Marek Kwiek, an academic-career researcher at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.
