The following is an excerpt from a very interesting study by Wang et al.
You can find the full-text here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.06958.pdf
“Science is 99 percent failure, and that’s an optimistic view”, said Robert Lefkowitz, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 2012 for his groundbreaking studies of G protein-coupled receptors. Despite the ubiquitous nature of failures, it remains unclear if a setback in an early career may augment or hamper an individual’s future career impact. Indeed, the Matthew effect suggests a rich get richer phenomenon where early-career success helps bring future victories. In addition to community recognition, bringing future attention and resources, success may also influence individual motivation, where positive feedback bolsters self-confidence. Together, these views indicate that it is early-career success, not failure, that would lead to future success. Yet at the same time other mechanisms suggest that the opposite may also be true. Indeed, screening mechanisms suggest that, if early-career failures screen out less-determined researchers, early setbacks among those who remain could, perhaps counterintuitively, become a marker for future achievement. Further, failure may teach valuable lessons that are hard to learn otherwise, while also motivating individuals to redouble effort, whereas success may be associated with complacency or reduced future effort due to utility maximization. Such positive views of failure are reflected in Nietzsche’s classic phrase “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”, in the celebration-of-failure mindset in Silicon Valley, and in a recent commencement address by U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts, who told graduating students “I wish you bad luck.” Overall, these divergent perspectives indicate that the net effect of an early-career setback is unclear. Given the consequential nature of this question to individual careers and the institutions that support and nurture them, and building on the remarkable progress in our quantitative understanding of science, here we ask: Can an early-career setback lead to future career impact?
You can find the full-text here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.06958.pdf
“Science is 99 percent failure, and that’s an optimistic view”, said Robert Lefkowitz, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 2012 for his groundbreaking studies of G protein-coupled receptors. Despite the ubiquitous nature of failures, it remains unclear if a setback in an early career may augment or hamper an individual’s future career impact. Indeed, the Matthew effect suggests a rich get richer phenomenon where early-career success helps bring future victories. In addition to community recognition, bringing future attention and resources, success may also influence individual motivation, where positive feedback bolsters self-confidence. Together, these views indicate that it is early-career success, not failure, that would lead to future success. Yet at the same time other mechanisms suggest that the opposite may also be true. Indeed, screening mechanisms suggest that, if early-career failures screen out less-determined researchers, early setbacks among those who remain could, perhaps counterintuitively, become a marker for future achievement. Further, failure may teach valuable lessons that are hard to learn otherwise, while also motivating individuals to redouble effort, whereas success may be associated with complacency or reduced future effort due to utility maximization. Such positive views of failure are reflected in Nietzsche’s classic phrase “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”, in the celebration-of-failure mindset in Silicon Valley, and in a recent commencement address by U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts, who told graduating students “I wish you bad luck.” Overall, these divergent perspectives indicate that the net effect of an early-career setback is unclear. Given the consequential nature of this question to individual careers and the institutions that support and nurture them, and building on the remarkable progress in our quantitative understanding of science, here we ask: Can an early-career setback lead to future career impact?
To offer quantitative answers to this question, we leverage a unique dataset, containing all R01 grant applications ever submitted to the NIH, to examine early-career success and failure. NIH funding decisions are largely determined by paylines derived from evaluation scores. Our empirical strategy harnesses the highly nonlinear relationship between funding success and evaluation score around the funding threshold. Indeed, focusing on individuals whose proposals fell just above and below the threshold allows us to compare observationally-similar individuals who are either near misses (individuals who just missed receiving funding) or narrow wins (individuals who just succeeded in getting funded). Here we focus on junior scientists by examining principal investigators (PIs) whose first application to the NIH was within the previous three years. We combine the NIH grant database with the Web of Science data, tracing their NIH R01 grant applications between 1990 and 2005 together with research outputs by the PIs, measured by their publication and citation records (see Supplementary Note 1 for details). In total, our analyses yielded 561 narrow wins and 623 near misses around the payline.
Published in Nature Communications
Published in Nature Communications
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