  Some scientists are more likely to explore unfamiliar research topics while
others tend to exploit existing ones. In previous work, correlations have been
found between scientists' topic choices and their career performances. However,
literature has yet to untangle the intricate interplay between scientific
impact and research topic choices, where scientific exploration and
exploitation intertwine. Here we study two metrics that gauge how frequently
scientists switch topic areas and how large those jumps are, and discover that
'cautious explorers' who switch topics frequently but do so to 'close' domains
have notably better future performance and can be identified at a remarkably
early career stage. Cautious explorers who balance exploration and exploitation
in their first four career years have up to 19% more citations per future
paper. Our results suggest that the proposed metrics depict the scholarly
traits of scientists throughout their careers and provide fresh insight,
especially for nurturing junior scientists.
