Scientific rewards for biomedical specialization are large and persistent

While specialization plays an essential role in how scientific research is pursued, we understand little about its effects on a researcher’s impact and career. In particular, the extent to which one specializes within their chosen fields likely has complex relationships with productivity, career stage, and eventual impact. We develop a novel and fine-grained approach for measuring a researcher’s level of specialization at each point in their career and apply it to the publication data of almost 30,000 established biomedical researchers. Using a within-researcher, panel-based econometric framework, we arrive at several important results. First, there are significant returns to specialization—25% more citations per standard deviation increase in specialization. Second, these returns are much higher early in a researcher’s career—as large as 75% per standard deviation increase in specialization. Third, returns are higher for researchers who publish few papers relative to their peers. Finally, we find that, all else equal, researchers who make large changes in their research direction see generally increased impact. The extent to which one specializes, particularly at early stages of a biomedical research career, appears to play a significant role in determining the citation-based impact of their publications. When this measure of impact is, implicitly or explicitly, an input into decisionmaking processes within the scientific system (for example, for job opportunities, promotions, or invited talks), these findings lead to some important implications for the system-level organisation of scientific research and the incentives that exist therein. We propose several mechanisms within modern scientific systems that likely lead to the returns we observe and discuss them within the broader context of reward structures in biomedicine and science more generally.