It took me some time to relocate the paper that was discussing this topic. I first thought of PNAS back in 2011 but the plot that I was looking for is in a Scientometrics 2019 article.
Take home message: It may be the your first or your last paper in your career that will have the biggest impact while the overall probably is highest at age 44.
For example, in contrast to Einstein, 93% of Nobel Prize-winning scientific breakthroughs have come from individuals beyond age 26, and even geniuses who emerge early may bloom more fully at more advanced ages. Einstein’s theory of general relativity, perhaps his greatest contribution, came largely in his early to mid-thirties. Copernicus completed his revolutionary theory of planetary motion around age 60. Mozart’s most famous operas came in his thirties, and Steve Jobs produced by far his most commercially successful innovations in his late forties and early fifties.
And here is a third paper, that shows that the interval widens at 65 while the mean performance remains stable.
And impact factor? The “publishing elite turned against impact factor” already 5 years ago as scientists are now tweaking the system by by self referencing and de referencing others. Most papers published in Nature received fewer citations than indicated by the impact factor of the journal.
