arXiv subjects

Lukasz Szymula

Publications and source records attributed to Lukasz Szymula.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Survivors in Science: A Comprehensive Analysis

Gender inequality in scientific careers can emerge at two analytically distinct margins: inequality in who remains in science and inequality among those who remain. While the former has been examined in research on attrition in science, much less is known about gender disparities among scientists who remain active for a long period. We address this gap by following survivors in science - scientists who started publishing in 2000 and continued publishing until 2020-2023 (N = 41,424). Together, they authored more than 2 million publications (N = 2,089,097) containing over 70 million cited references (N = 73,118,395) and worked in 38 OECD countries. Using raw Scopus data, we examine gender disparities in publishing intensity, international collaboration, journal prestige, productivity, citation impact and team size. Our findings reveal that men were on average 23% more productive than women cumulatively in 2000-2023 and 19% more productive in 2019-2023. By contrast, women and men published in similarly prestigious journals, achieved similar field-normalized citation impact, and worked in similarly sized teams. The structure of gender inequality is career-stage dependent: Disparities observed in broader populations of scientists need not persist among those who remain active in science longer, while the gender productivity gap persists.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2026

Young Male and Female Scientists: A Quantitative Exploratory Study of the Changing Demographics of the Global Scientific Workforce

In this study, the global scientific workforce is explored through large-scale, generational, cross-sectional, and longitudinal approaches. We examine 4.3 million nonoccasional scientists from 38 OECD countries publishing in 1990-2021. Our interest is in the changing distribution of young male and female scientists over time across 16 STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine) disciplines. We unpack the details of the changing scientific workforce using age groups. Some disciplines are already numerically dominated by women, and the change is fast in some and slow in other disciplines. In one-third of disciplines, there are already more youngest female than male scientists. Across all disciplines combined, the majority of women are young women. And more than half of women scientists (55.02%) are located in medicine. The usefulness of global bibliometric data sources in analyzing the scientific workforce along gender, age, discipline, and time is tested. Traditional aggregated data about scientists in general hide a nuanced picture of the changing gender dynamics within and across disciplines and age groups. The limitations of bibliometric datasets are explored, and global studies are compared with national-level studies. The methodological choices and their implications are shown, and new opportunities for how to study scientists globally are discussed.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2026

Quantifying Lifetime Productivity Changes: A Longitudinal Study of 320,000 Late-Career Scientists

The present study focuses on persistence in research productivity over the course of an individual's entire scientific career. We track 'late-career' scientists - scientists with at least 25 years of publishing experience (N=320,564) - in 16 STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) and social science disciplines from 38 OECD countries for up to five decades. Our OECD sample includes 79.42% of late-career scientists globally. We examine the details of their mobility patterns as early-career, mid-career, and late-career scientists between decile-based productivity classes, from the bottom 10% to top 10% of the productivity distribution. Methodologically, we turn a large-scale bibliometric dataset (Scopus raw data) into a comprehensive, longitudinal data source for research on careers in science. The global science system is highly immobile: half of global top performers continue their careers as top performers and one-third of global bottom performers as bottom performers. Jumpers-Up and Droppers-Down are extremely rare in science. The chances of moving radically up or down in productivity classes are marginal (1% or less). Our regression analyses show that productivity classes are highly path dependent: there is a single most important predictor of being a top performer, which is being a top performer at an earlier career stage.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2026

Women in Science: Measuring Participation in Europe Across Disciplines, Generations and Over Time

In this research, we quantify an inflow of women into science in the past three decades. Structured Big Data allow us to estimate the contribution of women scientists to the growth of science by disciplines (N = STEMM 14 disciplines) and over time (1990-2023). A monolithic segment of STEMM science emerges from this research as divided between the disciplines in which the growth was powerfully driven by women - and the disciplines in which the role of women was marginal. There are four disciplines in which 50% of currently publishing scientists are women; and five disciplines in which more than 50% of currently young scientists are women. But there is also a cluster of four highly mathematized disciplines (MATH, COMP, PHYS, and ENG) in which the growth of science is only marginally driven by women. Digital traces left by scientists in their publications indexed in global datasets open two new dimensions in large-scale academic profession studies: time and gender. The growth of science in Europe was accompanied by growth in the number of women scientists, but with powerful cross-disciplinary and cross-generational differentiations. We examined the share of women scientists coming from ten different age cohorts for 32 European and four comparator countries (the USA, Canada, Australia, and Japan). Our study sample was N = 1,740,985 scientists (including 39.40% women scientists). Three critical methodological challenges of using structured Big Data of the bibliometric type were discussed: gender determination, academic age determination, and discipline determination.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Quantifying Attrition in Science: A Cohort-Based, Longitudinal Study of Scientists in 38 OECD Countries

In this paper, we explore how members of the scientific community leave academic science and how attrition (defined as ceasing to publish) differs across genders, academic disciplines, and over time. Our approach is cohort-based and longitudinal: We track individual male and female scientists over time and quantify the phenomenon traditionally referred to as 'leaving science.' Using publication metadata from Scopus - a global bibliometric database of publications and citations - we follow the details of the publishing careers of scientists from 38 OECD countries who started publishing in 2000 (N = 142,776) and 2010 (N = 232,843). Our study is restricted to 16 STEMM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine), and we track the individual scholarly output of the two cohorts until 2022. We use survival analysis to compare attrition of men and women scientists. With more women in science and more women within cohorts, attrition is becoming ever less gendered. In addition to the combined aggregated changes at the level of all STEMM disciplines, widely nuanced changes were found to occur at the discipline level and over time. Attrition in science means different things for men versus women depending on the discipline; moreover, it means different things for scientists from different cohorts entering the scientific workforce. Finally, global bibliometric datasets were tested in the current study, opening new opportunities to explore gender and disciplinary differences in attrition.

physics.soc-ph↗