Scientists disrupt less but more persistently with career aging
4 affiliations
- 1National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
- 2Department of Information Resources Management, School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
- 3Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 5290002, Israel
- 4School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Abstract
Disruption describes the extent to which a scientific work overturns the prior knowledge on which it builds and leads to a new line of research. A scientist’s tendency to produce disruptive work has been found recently to decline over the career. However, the disruption index captures only how strongly a paper overturns prior work and ignores whether that disruption is later accepted or overturned by subsequent research. The persistent disruption (PD) framework adds this second perspective, identifying work that disrupts prior research and is then consolidated rather than displaced by later work. We examine how PD evolves over the career and find the opposite pattern: The probability of producing a persistent disruptive paper increases with career age. Senior scientists disrupt prior work less often compared to young, but once they do, the disruption tends to persist rather than being quickly superseded. Our results suggest that this reversal feature is due to the experience and we corroborate it across several dimensions of recognition. We also show that, at a fixed level of disruptiveness, the more senior the scientist is, it attracts more citations, social-media attention, and research grants. Nobel laureates also show delayed persistent disruptions. They exhibit high disruptive ability early in their careers, yet their prize-winning work appears years later. This lag further indicates that experience is needed to turn disruptive ability into the field’s most celebrated contributions.
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BibTeX
@article{deng2026scientists,
title = {{Scientists disrupt less but more persistently with career aging}},
author = {Nan Deng and Liying Yang and Shlomo Havlin and An Zeng},
journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1073/pnas.2626763123},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2626763123},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Scientists disrupt less but more persistently with career aging
AU - Nan Deng
AU - Liying Yang
AU - Shlomo Havlin
AU - An Zeng
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/19
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
DO - 10.1073/pnas.2626763123
UR - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2626763123
AB - Disruption describes the extent to which a scientific work overturns the prior knowledge on which it builds and leads to a new line of research. A scientist’s tendency to produce disruptive work has been found recently to decline over the career. However, the disruption index captures only how strongly a paper overturns prior work and ignores whether that disruption is later accepted or overturned by subsequent research. The persistent disruption (PD) framework adds this second perspective, identifying work that disrupts prior research and is then consolidated rather than displaced by later work. We examine how PD evolves over the career and find the opposite pattern: The probability of producing a persistent disruptive paper increases with career age. Senior scientists disrupt prior work less often compared to young, but once they do, the disruption tends to persist rather than being quickly superseded. Our results suggest that this reversal feature is due to the experience and we corroborate it across several dimensions of recognition. We also show that, at a fixed level of disruptiveness, the more senior the scientist is, it attracts more citations, social-media attention, and research grants. Nobel laureates also show delayed persistent disruptions. They exhibit high disruptive ability early in their careers, yet their prize-winning work appears years later. This lag further indicates that experience is needed to turn disruptive ability into the field’s most celebrated contributions.
SN - 0027-8424
SN - 1091-6490
ER -