How to Judge Scientists

Well, my 300th scientific article was just accepted for publication (N. Smolin, R. Biehl, G.R. Kneller, D. Richter and J.C. Smith "Functional Domain Motions in Proteins on the ~1-100ns Timescale: Comparison of Neutron Spin Echo Spectroscopy of Phosphoglycerate Kinase with Molecular Dynamics Simulation, Biophysical Journal - good job, Nikolai!) and there will be a few beers in the Union Jack pub later on in the week. However, this kind of artificial milestone brings one to reflect on how really to judge scientists.

Clearly, although a large number of publications does point to some aspect of productivity, such as, possibly, getting involved in a lot of projects and helping bring them to fruition, it is a very one-dimensional metric and misses important elements of scientific life. Numbers of citations, h-factors and the like also have their problems (just as an anecdote, for example, a very famous physicist working at Saclay when I was there once said one of his most cited articles was one he got wrong - his rivals loved pointing this out in their own publications!).

So how can one judge scientists? Well, increasingly, discoveries result from the voluntary sharing and development of knowledge through collaboration, rather than individual discoveries, and so an intriguing recent article by Azoulay et al tries to quantitatively track effects on collaborations of the ideas that scientists create. The concept is that a scientist will influence the people with whom they work, by forming an "invisible college" of ideas. To quantify this influence they tracked the publication productivity of faculty-level collaborators of eminent scientists in the life sciences. They found that if an eminent scientist suddenly and tragically died before the end of their career (mostly of heart attacks, but in the sample studied three were actually murdered!) then the publication productivity of their collaborators subsequently irreversibly declined on average by 8%.

The authors concluded that the effects of, as they call it, "superstar extinction" appear to be driven by the loss of an irreplaceable source of scientific ideas. My own opinion is that while this may indeed account for some of their observed effect, the collaborative nature of science means that success depends on not only the exchange of scientific ideas, but also inevitably social aspects such as friendship, motivation, drive and team spirit. When sources of these are not replaced then productivity will decrease.

High Productivity - an Aging Phenomenon?

The soccer field is so frustrating. With age I have learned exactly what to do on the field but physically am no longer capable of actually doing it. Meanwhile the young punks mindlessly whizz by and crash out of bounds. Is it the same with science?

The conventional wisdom has been that scientific productivity dwindles with age - brilliant young scientists making outstanding conceptual leaps. However, recent work suggests that this is not the case, and that prime productivity is maybe around 50 years old.

Well, I'm beginning to come round to the idea that older folks maybe aren't as clapped out as we all used to think. For example, members of our center had the pleasure this last month of lecturing on "The Molecules of Life" to ORICL - the Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning. The class was mostly retired scientists and engineers and, let me tell you, they were the liveliest bunch of students I have lectured to in quite a while. This begs the question as to whether they were always that engaged or have perked up with the advancing decades. I know the latter is true of myself - the reason I interminably interrupt and yap about in seminars others give is experience - whereas 30 years ago I could understand hardly anything scientists were talking about, these days it comes much more easily, and I think the same may have been true of our ORICL audience. And some scientists I know keep working for ever and ever, it seems. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a 102-year-old Nobel winning scientist (pictured above) said: 'Above all, don't fear the difficult moments - the best comes from them."

So maybe instead of prematurely fretting about retirement planning, 51-year-olds like myself should realise that the best years of our lives are still ahead? This maybe true in science, but it doesn't alter the fact that I'd still like to punt those mindless young punks off the soccer field - if only I could catch them!