Benefits and detriments of interdisciplinarity on early career scientists’ performance. An author-level approach for U.S. physicists and psychologists

Abstract

Is the pursuit of interdisciplinary or innovative research beneficial or detrimental for the impact of early career researchers? We focus on young scholars as they represent an understudied population who have yet to secure a place within academia. Which effects promise higher scientific recognition (i.e., citations) is therefore crucial for the high-stakes decisions young researchers face. To capture these effects, we introduce measurements for interdisciplinarity and novelty that can be applied to a researcher’s career. In contrast to previous studies investigating research impact on the paper level, hence, our paper focuses on a career perspective (i.e., the level of authors). To consider different disciplinary cultures, we utilize a comprehensive dataset on U.S. physicists (n = 4003) and psychologists (n = 4097), who graduated between 2008 and 2012, and traced their publication records. Our results indicate that conducting interdisciplinary research as an early career researcher in physics is beneficial, while it is negatively associated with research impact in psychology. In both fields, physics and psychology, early career researchers focusing on novel combinations of existing knowledge are associated with higher future impact. Taking some risks by deviating to a certain degree from mainstream paradigms seems therefore like a rewarding strategy for young scholars.

All power to the reviewers: British sociology under two-level supervision of the Research Excellence Framework

“…Only by doing so, we will be able to grasp the direct and indirect symbolic effects of performance measurements, self-optimization, and gaming the system strategies on the knowledge-producing and problem-solving capacities of academic disciplines, and the research diversity covered by different disciplines. Applying the framework of two-level supervision, we might as well uncover possible negative effects on the next generation of scholars (Unger et al, 2022) who are key to uphold research diversity and to provide solutions to pressing technological and societal problems.…”

Types of Collaboration and the Consolidation of Sociological Research Evidence from publications in five German sociology journals 2000–2019

“…Consequently, we draw on sociology as a case study, a discipline which is, firstly, multiparadigmatically structured, aligned to both the humanities and natural sciences at once while being heavily differentiated internally (Schmitz et al 2020;Schwemmer/Wieczorek 2020). Sociology is, secondly, simply one example of the many other multiparadigmatically structured disciplines in the social sciences (e.g., political science, communication science, ethnology, and geography c. p. Stinchcombe 1994) or the life sciences (e.g., psychology, see Unger et al 2022;Wieczorek et al 2021a). For this reason, we expect that our results will be applicable to these disciplines.…”

Is Management and Organizational Studies divided into (micro-)tribes?

“…Interdisciplinarity complicates the establishment of a coherent body of knowledge insofar, as the intellectual distance between potential collaborators increases the difficulty to find a common theoretical and methodological ground (Boix Mansilla et al, 2016;Cummings & Kiesler, 2007;Haeussler & Sauermann, 2020). Therefore, MOS had to (1) coordinate multiple knowledge domains at once, while (2) establish an own publication system, and (3) cushioning the negative effects related to interdisciplinary research such as reduced research productivity (Leahey et al, 2017), and potential losses in terms of citation numbers (Unger et al, 2022).…”