Quantifying attrition in science: a cohort-based, longitudinal study of scientists in 38 OECD countries
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.
In the present research, we explore how members of the scientific community leave academic science (in our conceptualization, how they cease publishing in academic journals) and how attrition differs across genders, academic disciplines, and over time. Our approach is cohort-based (Glenn, 2005) and longitudinal (Menard, 2002; Singer & Willett, 2003): We track male and female scientists over time and quantify the phenomenon traditionally referred to as “leaving science” (Geuna & Shibayama, 2015; Preston, 2004; White-Lewis et al., 2023; Zhou & Volkwein, 2004). Our focus is on leaving science, which can be seen as ceasing scholarly publishing because large-scale longitudinal data on leaving academic employment—which would be more adequate—are not currently available at a global level.
