Setbacks are an integral part of a scientific career, yet little is known about their long-term effects. Here we examine junior scientists applying for National Institutes of Health R01 grants. By focusing on proposals fell just below and just above the funding threshold, we compare near-miss with narrow-win applicants, and find that an early-career setback has powerful, opposing effects. On one hand, it significantly increases attrition, predicting more than a 10% chance of disappearing permanently from the NIH system. Yet, despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run. Moreover, this performance advantage seems to go beyond a screening mechanism, suggesting early-career setback appears to cause a performance improvement among those who persevere. Overall, these findings are consistent with the concept that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” which may have broad implications for identifying, training and nurturing junior scientists.
In this paper, we make use of two major data sources, i.e., grant application data and citation data.
Our main dataset contains all R01 grant applications ever submitted to the NIH between 1985 and 2015. Our data consist of 778,219 competing grant applications in total, supporting more than 170,000 research personnel across more than 2,500 U.S. institutions.
The citation datasets contains the Web of Science and the PubMed. Web of Science data provides comprehensive publication and citation records of more than 46 million papers published from 1900 to 2015 by more than 20,000 different journals. PubMed data contains all publications that belong to the biomedical science.