Many of those working in academia have anecdotal glimpses of the changing nature of the workforce; from endless postdoc purgatory to the armies of temporary technicians, a world very much removed from previous decades of apparent stable employment. A paper published recently in PNAS has confirmed these suspicions; Milojević and colleagues looked at changes in authorship in leading journals of representative fields in each of the three major scientific disciplines (astronomy, ecology, and robotics) to determine the longevity of the average scientific career. Their results give a nasty shock. By splitting authorship into two categories (‘lead’ and ‘supporting’ roles) and tracking when authors appear and disappear from published works, the paper determines that since the 1960’s academic science has relied increasingly on a temporary workforce.

Furthermore, the length of a scientific career has been dramatically shortened in recent decades, “…from relatively long survival times in the 1980s to very rapid…