Productivity, pressure, and new perspectives: impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on marine early-career researchers

Abstract

The worldwide disruption caused by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted the activities of marine scientists working towards the goals of the UN Ocean Decade. As in other disciplines, marine early-career researchers (ECRs) are essential contributors to the development of novel and innovative science. Based on a survey of 322 of our peers, we show that the pandemic negatively impacted marine ECRs in ways that further exacerbate existing structural challenges such as social isolation, job insecurity, and short-term contracts, competitive funding, and work pressure. Furthermore, we find that the success and wellbeing of marine ECRs depends heavily on networking opportunities, gaining practical experience, collecting data, and producing publications, all of which were disrupted by the pandemic. Our analysis shows that those in the earliest stages of their careers feel most vulnerable to long-term career disadvantage as a result of the pandemic. This paper contributes to the empirical body of work about the impacts of the pandemic on marine science and offers recommendations on how marine ECRs should be supported to achieve the UN Ocean Decade’s goal of producing “the science we need for the ocean we want”.

Pandemic Impact on Early Career Researchers in the United States

“…As similar with Jackman et al (2022), more ECRs are working remotely due to the pandemic citing more disadvantages (e.g., more meetings, reduced quality of meetings, and distractions with home- and work-life) than advantages (e.g., more time from less commuting, more flexibility with workdays, and engaging with collaborators) although our participants expressed more disadvantages with remote meetings. Schadeberg et al (2022) also found remote work advantageous for some ECRs, specifically more time from less commuting and more flexibility with workdays.…”

Designing a collective prototype of future (sub)tropical science

“…This paper is based on an interactive session held at a conference in 2021 (Higino et al, 2021). By that time, we were about 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, which highly impacted the scientific career of ECRs (Corlett et al, 2020;Lokhtina et al, 2022;Schadeberg et al, 2022). In this context, we aimed at using speculative story making to outline our wishes for the future of (sub)tropical ecological research (Box 1; Supplementary Information).…”

Building leaders for the UN Ocean Science Decade: a guide to supporting early career women researchers within academic marine research institutions

“…Targeted actions and concerted efforts between academic institutions, funders, industry, decision-makers, the scientific community, and wider society, will be essential to supporting and empowering women ECRs. The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a strong bias against ECRs (Schadeberg et al, 2022), especially due to parenthood (Cardel et al, 2020a;Staniscuaski et al, 2021) and presents a window of opportunity to reflect on academic practices and cultures (Gibson et al, 2020;Keynejad et al, 2021). To date, the majority of related research and policy initiatives on gender inequality within academia have focused on how to better support women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM; e.g.…”

“…Holzinger et al, 2018;Cardel et al, 2020a), particularly in marine science. In the marine context, previous research has focused on how to enable women scientists (Giakoumi et al, 2021;Shellock et al, 2022) or ECRs in marine science (Andrews et al, 2020;Brasier et al, 2020;Pardo et al, 2020;Schadeberg et al, 2022). But, research has not explored the intersection between gender and the early career stage.…”