The Scholarly Age—Beyond the Academic Age Using Techno-Scientific, Knowledge Appropriation and Mentoring Outputs

Various aspects of academic careers are studied using academic age as a proxy for the chronological age. The limitation of this metric is that it does not consider a wide range of scientific workforce outputs, since it only focuses on scientific publications. This study aims to extend understanding of the scientific workforce by amplifying the computation of academic age to include the scholarly age which considers different knowledge outputs from scientific publications. Using data from Colciencias/Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation's national research group assessments in Colombia, we analyzed 1,318,799 unique products from 1990–2020. We computed four typologies of scholarly age based on four products classes: new knowledge; technological development and innovation; social appropriation of knowledge and dissemination of science; and training human resources. The Shapiro-Wilk test shows a non-normal distribution of scholarly ages. The median scholarly age of social appropriation of knowledge and dissemination of science was 8 years; training human resources 7 years; new knowledge 5 years; and technological development and innovation 1 year. Statistically significant differences and large effect size, η²=.27, were found between all scholarly age typologies through Kruskal-Wallis and post-hoc Dunn tests. It reveals that estimating a researcher's expertise based on scientific publication alone is a partial and different proxy compared to the diverse spectrum of scholarly activities and further know-how researchers may possess.