Creativity is Productivity

Scientists receive fewer citations as they get older. Matt Clancy explains:

Pick any author at random, and on average the papers they publish earlier in their career, whether as first author or last author, will be more highly cited and cited by a more diverse group of fields, than a paper they publish later in their career.

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And the magnitudes involved here are quite large. In Yu et al. (2022), the papers published when you begin a career earn 50–65% more citations than those published at the end of a career. The effects are even larger for the citations received by patentees.

Does the spark of youthful genius burn out quickly, explaining the mediocrity of researchers in their later years? Interestingly, the answer is no:

The results of the previous section suggest [the chance of producing your most-cited paper] should fall pretty rapidly. At each career stage, your average citations are lower, and it would be natural to assume the best work you can produce will also tend to be lower impact, on average, than it was in earlier career stages.

But this is not what Liu and coauthors find! Instead, they find that any paper written, at any stage in your career, has about an equal probability of being your top cited paper!

This is not a new research finding. Nearly two centuries ago, the Belgian sociologist Adolphe Quetelet observed the impressively tight link between personal productivity and creative success.