Abstract
We present and analyze a life cycle model of a scientific career to investigate how the budget available for research related activities affects a scientist’s long run success in academia. Recognizing that reputation has a positive impact on obtaining research funds as well as on producing scientific output, we determine the optimal efforts of a scientist with respect to applying for research grants and costly science related activities to improve reputation, such as networking and inviting guest researchers, under the assumption that the total extent of these activities is limited by a time budget. We find that the optimal solution is history-dependent and study four different career paths which differ with respect to the initial reputation and the initial financial means to identify the determinants of success and failure in academia. It is shown that the extent to which a scientist finds the results of his or her work rewarding, has a substantial impact on whether the scientist will build up a successful career.
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Notes
According to Scopus, RFH has co-authored papers with over 140 different researchers (March 2023).
As of August 2023, RFH has over 200 publications with a total of over 21.000 citations according to Google Scholar.
Some of RFH’s most frequent co-authors were initially funded by projects, most prominently Karl F. Dörner.
Note that u(t) includes all kinds of scientific work, i.e., doing research, attending conferences, inviting research partners, etc.
Note that we assume the planning horizon starts at the point where the researcher makes the decision to really pursue an academic career, e.g., at the end of the Master or PhD program. At this point, the researcher might already have built up some reputation due to good grades and early publications.
Non-negativity of H(t) is implied by the non-negativity of u(t) if \(H_{0}> 0\).
In the subsequent we omit time argument t unless necessary for understanding.
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Feichtinger, G., Grass, D., Kort, P.M. et al. How Hartl exceeds Skiba: determinants of a successful career in academia. Cent Eur J Oper Res 32, 543–556 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10100-023-00889-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10100-023-00889-7