The chaperone effect in scientific publishing

Abstract

Experience plays a critical role in crafting high-impact scientific work. This is particularly evident in top multidisciplinary journals, where a scientist is unlikely to appear as senior author if he or she has not previously published within the same journal. Here, we develop a quantitative understanding of author order by quantifying this "chaperone effect," capturing how scientists transition into senior status within a particular publication venue. We illustrate that the chaperone effect has a different magnitude for journals in different branches of science, being more pronounced in medical and biological sciences and weaker in natural sciences. Finally, we show that in the case of high-impact venues, the chaperone effect has significant implications, specifically resulting in a higher average impact relative to papers authored by new principal investigators (PIs). Our findings shed light on the role played by experience in publishing within specific scientific journals, on the paths toward acquiring the necessary experience and expertise, and on the skills required to publish in prestigious venues.

Keywords: mentorship; science of science; scientific careers.

Fig. 1.

Probability of being listed as PI in Nature given previous publication history. (A) Terminology of authors. The last authors of all papers published each year in Nature are divided into three categories: new authors that have never published in Nature before, chaperoned authors that have published in Nature before only at junior level, and established authors that have already previously published as last authors. (B) Change in author fractions over time for three journals, displaying different trends over time. While in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) the proportion of different PIs tends to be equally balanced over time, in Physical Review D this proportion tends to become more unbalanced, with the fraction of established PIs increasing. For author fractions in PNAS see SI Appendix, Fig. S2.

Fig. 2.

Comparison of chaperone effect between scientific fields. Yearly distributions for the past 12 y are collapsed into single distributions and enable us to compare scientific fields (SI Appendix, section 2 and Fig. S1). For the different disciplines we find on average that ${⟨c/c_{\text{random}}⟩}_{\text{math}}\simeq 0.73$, ${⟨c/c_{\text{random}}⟩}_{\text{physics}}\simeq 0.91$, ${⟨c/c_{\text{random}}⟩}_{\text{chemistry}}\simeq 1.01$, ${⟨c/c_{\text{random}}⟩}_{\text{medicine}}\simeq 1.21$, and ${⟨c/c_{\text{random}}⟩}_{\text{biology}}\simeq 1.41$, while the effect for interdisciplinary journals is ${⟨c/c_{\text{random}}⟩}_{\text{interdisciplinary}}\simeq 1.68$. A Wilcoxon rank sum test, moreover, illustrates that the distributions are distinguishable $P\ll 0.05$. The $C_{\text{alphabet}}$ distributions all peak around 0.5 because of the analytical properties of the null model (see SI Appendix, section 1 for a proof). $C$ is represented by the colored distributions while $C_{\text{alphabet}}$ distributions are indicated in gray.

Fig. 3.

The advantages of chaperoned and established PIs. (A) The probability of transitioning to last author as a function of number of occurrences as nonlast author for a specialized journal, Physical Review D, and an interdisciplinary journal, Nature. (B) Average impact of papers in Nature, quantified with citations after 5 years from publication ($c_5$), for papers authored by new, chaperoned, and established last authors.