Contribution of postdoctoral fellows to fast-moving and competitive scientific research

This study explores the prevalence of postdoctoral fellows in fast-moving and competitive scientific research. We use the results of a new and original large-scale survey of scientists in Japan and the United States for the analyses. Descriptive statistics show that, in both Japan and the United States: (1) the mean citation time lag was shorter by about 2 years in the highly cited papers (top 1 %) compared to other normal papers; and (2) the...