The value of experience in research

•The number of previous publications is used as a measure of researchers’ experience.•The relationship between author experience and citations is estimated.•The numbers of times an article is cited increases concavely with author experience.

This article examines how different factors influence the number of times articles in the five most recognized transportation journals are cited. The effects of most of the explanatory variables indicating the characteristics of articles, authors and journals correspond with earlier studies of citation counts. Special focus in this study is placed on estimating the relationship between researchers’ human capital or skills and their experience. For the purpose of this study, human capital is defined as a scientist's ability to conduct research at the frontier of his or her discipline and is measured by how frequently his or her research is cited. Experience is measured by counting the number of their previous scientific articles. Using negative binomial regression, we find that experience offers a statistically significant positive effect on the human capital of scientists. However, this effect diminishes rapidly with the level of experience. This suggests that young researchers relatively quickly learn the skills and gain the knowledge necessary to produce high-quality research.