Understanding and modeling diverse scientific careers of researchers

•We define two metrics to measure the diversity of research career of a researcher.•Researchers work on few areas in the entire career, with several areas at a time.•Highly cited researchers typically follow “scatter-gather” policy in choosing areas.•Low-cited researchers work on various areas at a time as well as in the entire career.•Our stochastic model efficiently mimics the real dynamic of field selection process.

This paper analyzes the diverse scientific careers of researchers in order to understand the key factors that could lead to a successful career. Essentially, we intend to answer some specific questions pertaining to a researcher's scientific career – What are the local and the global dynamics regulating a researcher's decision to select a new field of research at different points of her entire career? What are the suitable quantitative indicators to measure the diversity of a researcher's scientific career? We propose two entropy-based metrics to measure a researcher's choice of research topics. Experiments with large computer science bibliographic dataset reveal that there is a strong correlation between the diversity of the career of a researcher and her success in scientific research in terms of the number of citations. We observe that while most of the researchers are biased toward either adopting diverse research fields or concentrating on very few fields, a majority of the prominent researchers tend to follow a typical “scatter-gather” policy – although their entire careers are immensely diverse with different types of fields selected at different time periods, they remain focused primarily in at most one or two fields at any particular time point of their career. Finally, we propose a stochastic model which, quite accurately, mimics the notion of field selection process observed in the real publication dataset.