The pervasive impact–innovation mismatch in individual scientific careers

A deep understanding of scientists’ career trajectories is fundamental to advancing science, guiding career advancement, award selection, and funding allocation. Academic impact and innovativeness represent two critical dimensions for assessing a scholar’s career contributions, while their intrinsic relationship at the individual level remains unclear. By utilizing large-scale bibliometric data, we uncover a pervasive negative correlation between the citation impact of paper sequences over the course of a scholar’s career and their innovativeness, captured by the disruption index and corroborated by the atypical journal combination index, indicating that a scientist’s more disruptive work tends to receive fewer citations on average. This mismatch is robust across most scientific disciplines, has been intensifying over recent decades, and is most pronounced for scholars with higher average citations and larger team sizes. We further propose a simple mechanistic model, grounded in the recognition delay for disruptive work and the limited attention of scholars, which reproduces the observed empirical patterns. Our findings uncover a fundamental tension between garnering widespread attention and producing disruptive work at the individual level, while also offering new perspectives for academic evaluation and promoting the dissemination of innovation.