Comeback or dropout: study of discontinued researchers at early career stage

Avijit Gayen (), Somyajit Chakraborty (), Saikat Mitra () and Angshuman Jana ()
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Avijit Gayen: Indian Institute of Information Technology
Somyajit Chakraborty: University College Cork
Saikat Mitra: Institute of Engineering and Management
Angshuman Jana: Indian Institute of Information Technology

Scientometrics, 2025, vol. 130, issue 2, No 27, 1236 pages

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Discontinued; Dropout; Collaboration network; Early career stage; Co-authorship network; Citation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-025-05243-z

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