Comeback or dropout: study of discontinued researchers at early career stage

In scientific research, understanding the dynamics of early-career researchers who discontinue their academic pursuits is paramount. However, this study aims to investigate the phenomenon of research discontinuation among early-career researchers, shedding light on the factors influencing their decisions and the potential for their return to the research arena. This work uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze the large-scale bibliography dataset. We extensively investigate the phenomenon of research discontinuation among early-career scholars. As the discontinuation of research activity at the early career stage could be an indication of drop-out in further activities, we have focused on the first 10 years of research tenure of the researchers. In our work, we specifically consider the three consecutive “non-publishing” years as the discontinuation of the research scholar. We conduct an experimental assessment of our proposed method using the AMiner Author dataset and note that among 113,637 researchers, - 89% of researchers have discontinued three years in their initial 10 years of research tenure. We further observe that out of the total researchers, 90% discontinued researchers drop out of their careers in the first ten years of their tenure of work.