Is a scientific career predictable?

Research on creativity has shown that people tend to produce their most important works when they are young. This is true for scientists too. But a new study finds that this is simply because scientists are more productive in their early years. When the study's authors discounted productivity, they found that a scientist has an equally good chance of producing a high impact paper towards the end of their career. Read more in this news story: http://www.nature.com/news/1.20926 The study was published in Science and you can read it here: http://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.aaf5239 The data visualization was created by Mauro Martino (IBM Research).