This research study aims to analyse the effect of the premature death of prominent scientists on the dynamics of the knowledge areas to which they contributed during their lifetimes. For this, we started off with a list of 12,935 elite scientists in fields of study related with the life sciences in the USA. The respective fields were delimited with tools constructed for this purpose. These scientists represent a sample of nearly 5% of scientists in their specialities. They are defined as elite professionals based on criteria such as the amount of research funds received, citations of their work in publications, number of patents, their belonging to organisations of prestige and prizes and awards received. A key aspect of our study involved identifying how many of them died prematurely, for which we used information from the United States press and academic obituaries.
Next, the CVs were analysed of 452 elite scientists (54 women, 398 men) who died between 1975 and 2003 before retiring or accessing management posts. In other words, they died when they were still fully competent and active in their profession.
Big stars leave in their wake a corpus of work and a group of followers interested in preserving their legacy
Apart from the fact that it is much easier to identify the cause of death for elite scientists, as opposed to the average scientist in the profession, the study also focuses on the scientific elite because the big stars leave in their wake a corpus of work and a group of followers interested in preserving their legacy, which enables their professional itineraries to be accurately tracked. The primary (and most original) point about this focus is that the time of death of elite scientists is used to calculate to what point, following their death, the production of knowledge changes in their fields of specialisation.
In short, sufficient data exist to analyse the path that has taken them from their origins to situations of generalised recognition. Reconstructing the academic careers of all these scientists enables us to find out their publication history, which means we can then define who is a “research superstar”. There are data on employment histories, degrees and qualifications earned, date of completion of studies, researcher gender and the departments to which they belonged, as well as a complete list of articles published, and the patents and research funds obtained annually by each individual.
Moreover, to work out how a specific field evolves, we have a list of all the scientists who at some stage have published in the field of research of the scientist who died prematurely, independently of whether they collaborated with the deceased individuals or not. We define a collaborating scientist as somebody who appears as co-author of a publication together with the deceased elite scientist. Similarly, non-collaborators are those members of the scientific community that never wrote an article with the deceased scientist; within this category are individuals working in fields that are both scientifically close and distant from the elite researcher.
To delimit the fields of research, it was observed that the 452 deceased scientists had published 3,074 articles in the five years prior to their death. For these articles, similarity based on the overlapping of key words helped us to identify the articles that are closest in thematic terms. Each of these 3,074 articles, together with the most similar articles in the scientific bibliography, are situated in a field of research. For example, geneticist Ira Herskowitz died in May 2003. Our algorithm identifies 72 scientific articles related with the article “The transcriptional program of sporulation in budding yeast”, published by the journal Sciencein the year 1998 and with Herskowitz as the main author. Our definition of the field of research encompasses this article and the 72 that our algorithm additionally identifies as related articles. Examples of other fields of research are the brain mechanisms that affect colour perception (Russell L.De Valois) or the pathology of smoking and emphysema (Aaron Janoff).