Leaders, successors and toilers: how scientists reveal their worth
Psychologists and economists study human behaviour to describe personality types. This can be useful, for example, to predict consumer behaviour based on personality types.
Two mathematicians from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology have devised a new typology of successful researchers, exploring how scientist types vary depending on discipline and what this says about the relationship between maths, physics and psychology.
The authors identified three clusters. “Leaders” are experienced scientists widely recognised in their fields for research which secured an annual citation count increase for them, while “successors” are young scientists with more citations than “toilers,” who earn their high citation metrics by years of hard work but lack grand scientific achievements.
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The distribution for top physicists was similar to that of mathematicians, but with more successful young scientists at the expense of leaders and toilers, perhaps a confirmation of the comparatively solitary nature of mathematics. Among the top 500 researchers with mathematics as their field of interest, 52 per cent were toilers, with successors and leaders at 25.8 and 22.2 per cent respectively, while for physicists, nearly 32 per cent were successors. For psychologists, toilers still made up the majority (as it did for mathematicians and physicists), but this was followed by leaders at 34 per cent, and successors a distant third, at just over 18 per cent.
