Surprising Patterns of Changing Productivity Classes. A Longitudinal Study of 320,000 Scientists

Locked-In Scientific Hierarchies

The global scientific enterprise is increasingly locked into rigid hierarchies where early success almost entirely determines lifelong research output, with radical career mobility between productivity levels occurring in fewer than 1% of cases.

A massive new longitudinal analysis of over 320,000 late-career scientists across OECD countries reveals extreme path-dependence in publishing productivity, where half of top performers stay elite and one-third of low performers remain at the bottom throughout their careers.

This immobility entrenches inequality in science funding, appointments, and influence, as early advantages—often tied to elite institutions or resources—become nearly impossible to overcome later.

Amid rising scrutiny of research system fairness and efficiency in 2025-2026, these patterns challenge assumptions about meritocracy and highlight risks that talent gets wasted while resources concentrate further among already advantaged groups.

New evidence from bibliometric tracking of 320,564 scientists with at least 25 years of publishing history in 16 STEMM and social science fields shows that the global science system is highly immobile. Covering up to five decades of output from 38 OECD countries—which represent 79.42% of such late-career researchers worldwide—the study finds that extreme shifts between productivity deciles (the top 10% versus bottom 10%) are vanishingly rare, with probabilities of jumping up or dropping down at 1% or less.

Half of those who start as top performers (decile 10) remain there into late career, while roughly one-third of bottom performers stay at the low end. Regression models identify early-career top performance as the dominant predictor of later elite status, far outweighing other factors. This path-dependence echoes cumulative advantage theories but proves stronger and more persistent than previously quantified at this scale.

The timing of this research matters because science policy debates have intensified around equity and resource allocation. Recent features of related work on attrition, retention, and stratification in global science appeared in Nature News during 2024 and 2025, reflecting growing concern over whether current systems reward genuine talent or merely perpetuate initial privileges. Elite universities and well-funded labs confer advantages—such as access to expensive infrastructure in fields like medicine—that compound over decades, making upward mobility from lower-tier starting points structurally difficult.

Real-world consequences hit funding bodies, universities, and individual careers. Grant success, promotions, and tenure increasingly correlate with sustained high output, locking early bloomers into advantageous positions while sidelining others regardless of later potential. This risks misallocation of billions in public research dollars annually, as talent from less privileged backgrounds or institutions struggles to break through. In competitive disciplines like chemistry or computer science, early barriers appear especially high, limiting diversity and innovation.

Non-obvious tensions include trade-offs between rewarding proven performers and fostering renewal. Heavy reliance on past performance incentivizes risk-averse behavior and may discourage bold shifts in research direction. It also intersects with gender and geographic divides: while not the core focus here, related studies show women and researchers from lower-resource settings face compounded hurdles to entering top classes early. Counterarguments suggest immobility reflects genuine ability differences rather than unfairness, yet the data's scale and controls make pure merit explanations harder to sustain without addressing starting conditions.