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Comment by radioactivist | Hacker News Reader

Something seems a bit wrong with the graph "Publication rate by career length" -- should the y-axis be "Average number of published papers per year"? (I can't imagine that someone whose first paper was in the 1950s only published 1 additional paper in the next 30 years)

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They got their PhD and entered industry. Publication was no longer a priority and maybe not even an option.

If the axis labels are correct (which, after referring to the full paper, they seem to be) then I think this is the only reasonable explanation. I.e. that the dataset tracks all authors of scientific publications, rather than those who are active researchers (or had research careers and subsequently passed). [Note: I did not see any attempt to take this into account upon skimming the full paper]

Given the high attrition rate in many academic fields (and the small number of publications typical in early years) this would then rationalize the low numbers seen here. Though, I would say the meaning of these numbers would be quite different than if this were presented for those who had research careers (the more relevant number I think).

No, that's reasonable. Look at is this way: the modal category of authors is the group that has published one paper. The next-largest group published two. And so on.

It's a very very small overall percentage of authors that publish more than one paper per year!

I disagree. One paper per year for someone who started publishing in the 50s wouldn't be insane to me (though, low to my eye) -- but publishing one paper every few decades would be insane by any standard (and you couldn't get to millions of papers published per year at that rate).

My grandfather (born well before the 50s, but still) was a professor his entire career and I can't a single (unambiguous) publication of his online. I would not be surprised to learn there were no papers, although I believe a book chapter occurred at some point.

My father, born in the 50s and like another commenter discussed primarily involved in industry, appears to have three or four.

Your norms and intuitions are based the present craziness. Here's Higgs (of Higgs-Boson fame) who's published 10 papers since 1964:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...

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