“Interdisciplinary research has always been considered the most valuable. As an economist, you’d naturally assume that young researchers engaged in interdisciplinary work would reap the greatest rewards. But that’s not the case.”
Everyone agrees interdisciplinary research is a big deal, especially computer science plus fields like biomedicine and engineering. Some institutes and government aganecies is getting in on the action, setting up a special scholarship or department to fund this stuff.
But here’s the kicker: Turns out, diving headfirst into interdisciplinary research can be tough on young scientists. A new study found that they often face bigger career hurdles than those sticking to one specific field after getting a job.
One of the study’s authors, Bruce Weinberg, was even surprised. Weinberg and his colleagues sought to understand: how do scientists who focus on interdisciplinary research during their graduate studies and early careers compare in terms of career performance and potential to scientists who primarily stick to a single discipline? He and his team crunched data on over 150,000 biomedical PhDs (who graduated between 1970 and 2013) and over 2.6 million research papers to figure out why (Berkes et al., 2024).
The survival rate
Reduced career longevity (discovered) for interdisciplinary researchers with PhDs in Biomedical Fields.
One thing they looked at was ‘academic lifespan’ – how long researchers stay active in their field. Basically, if you don’t publish for five years straight, you’re considered ‘out’ (harsh, but true in academia!).
Researchers are divided into 5 groups based on the level of initial interdisciplinarity (top 1%, 1 to 10%, 10 to 25%, 25 to 75%, and 75 to 100%).
It seems that regardless of interdisciplinarity, the survival rate declines rapidly in the early career. The most interdisciplinary researchers (top 1% and 1-10%) are at a higher risk of an early quit from academia. Interestingly, it also happens to those who are the least interdisciplinary (75-100%). It takes more than 20 years for moderately interdisciplinary researchers to stop publishing.
The interdisciplinarity
Interdisciplinarity increases over the career for initial non-interdisciplinarians and declines for initial interdisciplinarians.
The study also took a look at how researchers’ interdisciplinarity changed over their careers. They split the 154,021 researchers into two groups – those who started out more interdisciplinary than average and those who started out less so. Then, they tracked how their interdisciplinarity evolved over time. And guess what? A pretty interesting pattern popped up.
Basically, the researchers who were super interdisciplinary from the get-go tended to become less interdisciplinary over time. On the flip side, those who started out more focused on a single field tended to branch out and become more interdisciplinary. It’s actually a good thing that the initially focused researchers broadened their horizons. But it’s also kind of worrying that the folks who were already interdisciplinary started to narrow their focus.
The inheritance
Advisees inherit interdisciplinarity from their advisors.
The researchers sorted the PhD students into 18 groups based on how interdisciplinary their advisors were, making sure each group had the same number of students. Then, they looked at the average ‘starting’ interdisciplinarity of the advisees in each group. This gave them some bars showing how advisor interdisciplinarity and student interdisciplinarity were related.
So, does picking a certain type of advisor determine your career? Well, kind of. It definitely has some influence, but it’s not the whole story.
The trend
Entrants reduce the level of interdisciplinary research.
You might wonder, if everyone’s branching out, why aren’t all fields just a big mix already? To understand this trend, the researchers used a ‘stock and flow’ analysis to track how interdisciplinarity changed in biomedical research between 1970 and 2010.
They looked at the population of researchers each year and divided them into four groups:
- Newbies (Entrants): Published for the first time that year and again later.
- Leavers (Exiters): Published for the last time that year and had published before.
- One-Hit Wonders (One-timers): Only ever published that year.
- The Regulars (Continuers): Published that year, before, and after.
Panel A of the figure shows that most publications came from the regulars, and there were more newbies than leavers. Panel B shows that the newbies were less interdisciplinary than the other groups.
So, the way higher education is set up now, it’s more about creating specialists than generalists.
Fortress Besieged
The way I see it, whether a researcher focuses on one area or branches out is always changing – it’s not a fixed thing. The only constant difference is what academia and industry want. In the academic world, sticking to one field is often seen as ‘serious’ research, while interdisciplinarity is a way to break free from rigid ideas and find new inspiration.
But when you move into the real world (outside of academia), that flips! Practical, interdisciplinary skills become key, and pure theory becomes the way to escape the demands of the everyday grind.