Early-Career Research Funding Predicts Success in Scientific Careers: A Mathematical Model and Empirical Analysis of Matthew Effects

Source abstract

Success breeds success. This simple idea—the Matthew effect, or cumulative advantage—is a classical theme in the science of science. Does obtaining a research grant very early in a researcher’s career, at the very beginning of their academic trajectory, create a performance gap that continues to widen for decades? We approach this question from two sides. First, we build a mathematical model in which talent, publications, research funding, and promotion mutually reinforce one another, and show that even when talent is held constant, the gap in research output between early grant recipients and non-recipients widens over time. We distil this prediction into two hypotheses. Second, we test these hypotheses using a large panel dataset of approximately 40,000 researchers spanning eight broad fields of Japanese academia, drawn from the researchmap database. Using the graduate school of origin as a proxy for talent and prestige, we find that the advantage associated with receiving an early-career fellowship remains positive, statistically significant, and steadily increases over time even after accounting for differences in the institution of origin. In short, even a head start lasting only a few years leaves a lasting mark on a researcher’s career, with its effects continuing to grow more than a decade later. By combining an explicit model of cumulative advantage with large-scale empirical evidence across fields, we quantify how the earliest allocation of research resources shapes the long-term stratification of science.