its quite surprising to me that publishing a highly cited paper early in one’s career isn’t correlated with larger total number of citations, at the high-performing tail (did I understand that right? Were they considering the right tail?
No, they considered the full distribution of scientists with long careers and sustained publication activity (which themselves form the tail of the larger population of everyone with a PhD).
That is, their analysis includes the right tail but wasn’t exclusively focused on it. Since by its very nature there will only be few data points in the right tail, it won’t have a lot of weight when fitting their model. So it could in principle be the case that if we looked only at the right tail specifically this would suggest a different model.
It is certainly possible that early successes may play a larger causal role in the extreme right tail—we often find distributions that are mostly log-normal, but with a power-law tail, suggesting that the extreme tail may follow different dynamics.
No, they considered the full distribution of scientists with long careers and sustained publication activity (which themselves form the tail of the larger population of everyone with a PhD).
That is, their analysis includes the right tail but wasn’t exclusively focused on it. Since by its very nature there will only be few data points in the right tail, it won’t have a lot of weight when fitting their model. So it could in principle be the case that if we looked only at the right tail specifically this would suggest a different model.
It is certainly possible that early successes may play a larger causal role in the extreme right tail—we often find distributions that are mostly log-normal, but with a power-law tail, suggesting that the extreme tail may follow different dynamics.