The Effect Of Age On Research Productivity

In the knowledge era, the accumulation and application of knowledge and information is the major incentives to economy development. Compared with knowledge application, knowledge creation is even more valuable. Researchers are the primary source of knowledge innovation. In this study, we examined factors which have significant roles to play in knowledge creation process of researchers.First we summarize literatures on age and research productivity. It shows that age has a varying impact on job performance within different career domain and it is much more complicating with regard to knowledge workers. Life cycle model, cumulative model, social network model and human capital theory further suggest that several potential correlates of research productivity include age, subject area, gender, institutional type and collaboration.Then we conduct an empirical study with cross-sectional data on researchers in Humanities,Social Science and Management fields. It turns out that 1) the performance peak age of researchers is between 45 and 49; 2)researchers are heavily clustered in few major institutions and geographic location, especially in social science domain; 3) the gender of research has significant effect on the performance of researchers.Finally, implication for human resource management and future research direction are discussed in the end of the paper.