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Comeback or dropout: study of discontinued researchers at early career stage
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Date
2025-02-05
Authors
Gayen, Avijit
Chakraborty, Somyajit
Mitra, Saikat
Jana, Angshuman
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Springer Nature
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Abstract
In scientific research, understanding the dynamics of early-career researchers who discontinue their academic pursuits is paramount. However, this study aims to investigate the phenomenon of research discontinuation among early-career researchers, shedding light on the factors influencing their decisions and the potential for their return to the research arena. This work uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze the large-scale bibliography dataset. We extensively investigate the phenomenon of research discontinuation among early-career scholars. As the discontinuation of research activity at the early career stage could be an indication of drop-out in further activities, we have focused on the first 10 years of research tenure of the researchers. In our work, we specifically consider the three consecutive “non-publishing” years as the discontinuation of the research scholar. We conduct an experimental assessment of our proposed method using the AMiner Author dataset and note that among 113,637 researchers, - 89% of researchers have discontinued three years in their initial 10 years of research tenure. We further observe that out of the total researchers, 90% discontinued researchers drop out of their careers in the first ten years of their tenure of work.
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Keywords
Discontinued , Dropout , Collaboration network , Early career stage , Co-authorship network , Citation
Citation
Gayen, A., Chakraborty, S., Mitra, S. and Jana, A. (2025) 'Comeback or dropout: study of discontinued researchers at early career stage', Scientometrics, pp.1-36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-025-05243-z
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© 2025, Akadémiai Kiadó Zrt. Published by Springer Nature Limited. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Nature Sustainability. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-025-05243-z