Are older academics past their productive peak?

This all relates to those who have followed a 'conventional' route into academia - what about those who have come to research later on? As a 50-something PhD student I have all the enthusiasm and buzz and loads of ideas of any PhD student even if my hair is greyer and my pace is slower... There is also the fact that older academics tend to be given administrative duties as well as a teaching load. Now I have a full-time job as well as my research - fortunately in the same area so they blur - and sometimes find that time I want to use for research is taken over by other things that need doing.

This is all rather depressing for a 50-something like me. On the one hand, we are all told that everyone will have to work until 70+ in the future but on the other, we could be written off when seen as "past it". There are also the factors mentioned in the comment above - I had a commercial job for a while prior to entering academic life and have also held substantial administrative roles. Since departments have to be run and students also figure somewhere in the equation, a mix of skills is bound to develop unless one is permanently bought out of teaching.

"When age has an effect, it is the middle-aged, rather than the young, who are most creative." That may be so. It may also be that people are most productive after a certain number of years of experience. If that's true, then the most productive years of an academic may occur at a different point for a) someone who began work in academia at 25 and b) someone who began work in academia at 40. A possible analogy might be to the writer of prose fiction. At the beginning of his/her career s/he might have lots of ideas but under-developed technique. Towards the end, it might be a case of fully developed technique but fewer ideas. Somewhere in the middle might come a stage at which both technique and ideas are at an ideal level. Similar for academics?

My father, Jack Kuipers, recently died at the age of 95. At the age of 78, he published his book on Quaternions and Rotation Sequences with Princeton University Press. (http://www.amazon.com/Quaternions-Rotation-Sequences-Applications-Aerospace/dp/0691102988) I am told that it was an Amazon best-seller in two cities: Huntsville, Alabama (where there is a large NASA site) and China Lake, California (where there is a large Air Force base). As a still-productive 67-year-old academic, I find this very encouraging.

The article claims there is age discrimination in the Netherlands where the official retirement age is 65. The compulsory retirement age in Hong Kong is 60!

All this is quite useless because it (mis)measures quality by counting papers and citations.

I agree with David Colquhoun . It is my aspiration as I get older to publish fewer and fewer papers which are of higher and higher standard. Troubling though is figure 1 which suggest that citations decline with age though. I would be interested to know if this is overall number of citations, which would decline if the actual number of publications declined (particularly if self citation is included), or citations-per-publication.

In reply to Cooke, Figure 1 presents data collected in the 70s, when the academic system was much less competitive. It also does not distinguish more active from less active publishers. The study by Gingras et al. (2008) conducted in Quebec, where retirement is no longer compulsory, showed that researchers, who never published a great deal, declined in their productivity after age 50. This was not the case for active professors. Furthermore, the average number of articles that they published in high-impact journals and that were highly cited both rose steadily up to the age of 70.

In my field (biological sciences) you would be hard pressed to say exactly who has made a discovery. On a paper you have up to 20 authors, and while often the individual contributions are mentioned, it is unclear who had the decisive idea, or who conducted the decisive experiment. I am unsure you can deduce an "age" of discovery there. Quite often it will be a true collaborative effort. The other issue is that somtimes younger researchers perform a "doomed" experiment out of ignorance and it works unexpectedly. I, personally, have welcomed that "freedom" when I was a PhD student, and I try to give my PhD students and post-docs the same freedom; after all, quite often you learn from failures as well as successes. Whether that is wise in an age of turbo-accountability is a different question. My sense would be that scientific validity and innovation and applicability should be the guiding principles to award funding and accept papers. Ageism, like sexism and racism should have no place in science.