Age and the Trying Out of New Ideas

Mikko Packalen and Jay Bhattacharya

No 20920, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Older scientists are often seen as less open to new ideas than younger scientists. We put this assertion to an empirical test. Using a measure of new ideas derived from the text of nearly all biomedical scientific articles published since 1946, we compare the tendency of younger and older researchers to try out new ideas in their work. We find that papers published in biomedicine by younger researchers are more likely to build on new ideas. Collaboration with a more experienced researcher matters as well. Papers with a young first author and a more experienced last author are more likely to try out newer ideas than papers published by other team configurations. Given the crucial role that the trying out of new ideas plays in the advancement of science, our results buttress the importance of funding scientific work by young researchers.

JEL-codes: I1 J11 O31 O32 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-sog
Note: AG EH PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published as Mikko Packalen & Jay Bhattacharya, 2019. "Age and the Trying Out of New Ideas," Journal of Human Capital, vol 13(2), pages 341-373.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20920.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20920

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20920

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().