Aging and Scientific Performance: An Empirical Study on Korean University Researchers

This study aims to contribute to the debate over the age-productivity relationships in scientific and technological research. For this purpose, we conducted an empirical experiment employing a time-series cross-section dataset derived from the KRI of the NRF containing data on individual researchers of fifty major universities in Korea covering the period of 2008-2013. This study has found that: (1) there exists an inverse U-shaped age-productivity relationship at the level of individual researchers; (2) the impact of the average age of a research group on the productivity of individual researchers varies across fields; (3) male and female researchers move along different age-productivity curves; and (4) the inverse U-shaped age-productivity relationship also holds at the level of organizations. The results suggest that the aging of researchers in Korea will soon reach the stage where serious losses in research productivity become a reality. Yet, it is not so clear whether the observed decline in the performance of older researchers is due to declining cognitive capability, which is an unavoidable result of aging, or to declining motivation, which results from an institutional system that discourages older researchers' research activities (such as reduced access to research opportunities or mandatory retirement). What is clear is that it is inevitable for the Korean science system to change the current seniority- and age-based organizational system into one of higher adaptability.