Slow convergence: Career impediments to interdisciplinary biomedical research
dc.contributor.author | Berkes, Enrico | |
dc.contributor.author | Marion, Monica | |
dc.contributor.author | Milojević, Staša | |
dc.contributor.author | Weinberg, Bruce A. | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2024-08-20T13:45:33Z | |
dc.date.available | 2024-08-20T13:45:33Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2024-07-29 | |
dc.description.abstract | Despite the long-standing calls for increased levels of interdisciplinary research as a way to address society’s grand challenges, most science is still disciplinary. To understand the slow rate of convergence to more interdisciplinary research, we examine 154,021 researchers who received a PhD in a biomedical field between 1970 and 2013, measuring the interdisciplinarity of their articles using the disciplinary composition of references. We provide a range of evidence that interdisciplinary research is impactful, but that those who conduct it face early career impediments. The researchers who are initially the most interdisciplinary tend to stop publishing earlier in their careers—it takes about 8 y for half of the researchers in the top percentile in terms of initial interdisciplinarity to stop publishing, compared to more than 20 y for moderately interdisciplinary researchers (10th to 75th percentiles). Moreover, perhaps in response to career challenges, initially interdisciplinary researchers on average decrease their interdisciplinarity over time. These forces reduce the stock of interdisciplinary researchers who can train future cohorts. Indeed, new graduates tend to be less interdisciplinary than the stock of active researchers. We show that interdisciplinarity does increase over time despite these dampening forces because initially disciplinary researchers become more interdisciplinary as their careers progress. | |
dc.description.sponsorship | E.B. and B.W. gratefully acknowledge support from theNational Institute on Aging, the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research,and the NSF’s Science of Science and Innovation Policy program through P01AG039347; the NSF’s Directorate for STEM Education, Division of GraduateEducation 1348691, 1535399, 1760544, and 2100234; and the Ewing MarionKauffman and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations. S.M. and M.M. acknowledge supportfrom the NSF’s Directorate for STEM Education, Division of Graduate Education2100235. S.M. acknowledges that this material is also based upon work supportedby the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Award FA9550-19-1-0391. Thiswork uses the Web of Science data by Clarivate Analytics provided by the IndianaUniversity Network Science Institute and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network ScienceCenter at Indiana University and ProQuest’s Dissertation and Theses Database. Weare extremely grateful to Vetle Torvik and Neil Smalheiser for sharing with us theupdated Authorlink dataset. We thank Shivam Agrawal for his research assistance. | |
dc.description.uri | https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2402646121 | |
dc.format.extent | 9 pages | |
dc.genre | journal articles | |
dc.identifier | doi:10.13016/m2zjln-gi1z | |
dc.identifier.citation | Berkes, Enrico, Monica Marion, Staša Milojević, and Bruce A. Weinberg. “Slow Convergence: Career Impediments to Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121, no. 32 (August 6, 2024): e2402646121. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2402646121. | |
dc.identifier.uri | https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2402646121 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11603/35727 | |
dc.language.iso | en_US | |
dc.publisher | PNAS | |
dc.relation.isAvailableAt | The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) | |
dc.relation.ispartof | UMBC Economics Department | |
dc.relation.ispartof | UMBC Faculty Collection | |
dc.rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International | |
dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ | |
dc.title | Slow convergence: Career impediments to interdisciplinary biomedical research | |
dc.type | Text | |
dcterms.creator | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5117-9918 |
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