The impact of early debut on scientists: Evidence from the Young Scientists Fund of the NSFC

Wanshu Zhang, Xuefeng Wang, Hongshu Chen and Jia Liu

Research Policy, 2024, vol. 53, issue 2

Abstract: Early career funding is usually the first prestigious funding young scientists receive, allowing them to make their debut on a nationally recognised foundation. In this study, we examined the impact of an early debut on young scientists' research productivity. First-movers and late-comers are distinguished based on the years between the first application to the final award of early career funding. We then explored the variations between 3353 first-movers and 4650 late-comers of the Young Scientists Fund sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. We find that an early debut has a strong positive short-term effect on research productivity in terms of both quantity and quality, and the positive effect amplifies with the increasing time span of the final award between first-movers and late-comers. However, the strong positive effect on long-term productivity presents only in the three- and four-year early debuts. These results suggest that the productivity gains of young scientists with an early debut tend to decrease over time. The significant gap between first-movers and three-, and four-year late-comers in the long term demonstrates a time threshold which distinguishes scientists' long-term research productivity. In addition, we find that the research productivity gap can be explained by the expanding research network and increasing funding opportunities.

Keywords: Public funding; Young scientists; Research productivity; Early debut (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 O31 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733323002196
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:respol:v:53:y:2024:i:2:s0048733323002196

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2023.104935

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().