Research institutions tout the value of scholarship that crosses disciplines – but academia pushes interdisciplinary researchers out

The most exciting landmark scientific achievements don’t happen without researchers sharing and collaborating with others outside their field. When people first landed on the Moon in 1969, Neil Armstrong’s first footsteps marked the realization of a century-long vision that integrated a variety of scientific fields. Landing on the Moon required expertise in electrical, mechanical, chemical and computer engineering, as well as astronomy and physics.

Similarly, the advances in genetics that have made the biotechnology revolution possible involved contributions from disciplines as far ranging as biology, mathematics and statistics, chemistry and computer science.

Today, some of the biggest challenges that scientists face are interdisciplinary in nature – from studying the effects of climate change to managing generative artificial intelligence.

Climate change isn’t only an environmental problem, just like the impact of AI isn’t solely technological. Scientists in a variety of disciplines can independently come up with ways to examine these issues, but as research has shown, the most effective approaches often integrate multiple fields.

Our own interdisciplinary team of researchers in economics and informatics – itself an interdisciplinary field focused on technology, information and people – explored the career hurdles that many interdisciplinary researchers face in a study published in July 2024. We studied how these challenges affect their careers and the production of interdisciplinary research.

Infrastructure and interdisciplinary work

Government and private funders alike have introduced programs to support interdisciplinary work. Universities foster interdisciplinary research through joint appointments, hiring multiple faculty at once, centers that span disciplines, and graduate programs that join different fields.

With these efforts, you might expect a high demand and exceptional career outcomes for interdisciplinary researchers. However, this does not appear to be the case. The American academic system is still very much dominated by disciplines and academic departments. A researcher whose work doesn’t fit neatly into a category can easily fall through the cracks.

The structure of distinct disciplines and departments is deeply embedded in universities. Many researchers have trouble finding a journal willing to publish interdisciplinary papers or a department willing to offer interdisciplinary classes. Students interested in this work have difficulty finding mentors.

When interdisciplinary researchers apply for jobs, promotion and tenure, hiring committees made up of members of a single discipline may have difficulty evaluating their work. That issue can put these researchers at a disadvantage, compared to candidates with more traditional backgrounds.

Interdisciplinary centers, institutes and programs are often less permanent structures than departments. Sometimes they’re devised as solutions to fill in the cracks between the work done in different departments or to address real-world problems. These centers are a kind of borderlands – they can attract scientists, especially established ones, who want to identify and pivot toward new research problems. But they’re not generally designed to support scientists’ careers long term.

Career challenges

Our 2024 study focused on biomedical research, which can benefit from an interdisciplinary approach because of the complexity of biological processes and human behavior.

To start, we wanted to understand whether researchers with interdisciplinary training had longer careers publishing their research than those without. The results were stark.

Interdisciplinary researchers stopped publishing much earlier than researchers who stuck to a single discipline. The most interdisciplinary researchers – those whose work draws the most on other disciplines beyond their primary field – had the shortest careers. Half of the most interdisciplinary researchers – the top 1% in terms of the interdisciplinarity of their work as graduate students – stopped publishing within eight years of graduation. Moderately interdisciplinary and single-discipline researchers kept publishing for more than 20 years.

Many interdisciplinary researchers left academia early in their career, by the point when most scholars transition into faculty positions and start to get promoted or receive tenure.

Many researchers who leave do important work in industry and other sectors. However, the high attrition rate of these researchers in biomedicine means that few senior scientists remain in academia to conduct interdisciplinary research or train future interdisciplinary researchers.

Researchers who started out as interdisciplinary tended to become more focused on one discipline early in their careers, as if recognizing that disciplinary work is the smoothest route to success.

However, we also found that over the 40-year period our study examined, biomedical research became more interdisciplinary overall. Ironically, single-discipline researchers, whose interdisciplinary work tends to be lower quality, drove that growth, becoming more interdisciplinary as their careers progressed.

But our study found that these researchers usually didn’t have specialized training in interdisciplinary research. They may have become more interdisciplinary through collaborations with researchers in other fields.

So, even though the overall level of interdisciplinarity in the field increased, trained interdisciplinary researchers left academia, and the single-discipline researchers without the same training were the ones conducting much of the interdisciplinary work.

Consequences for research

Our findings indicate another striking trend: Researchers entering the research community tended to be less interdisciplinary than the ones already in it.

Studies have shown that early career researchers often do the most innovative work. But at this formative career stage, they do not lend their talents to interdisciplinary work as frequently.

While many people in the academic community say they want to see more interdisciplinary research, the new, more discipline-focused scholars joining the system aren’t conducting this work.

Our analysis suggests that finding ways for universities, departments and funders to support early career interdisciplinary researchers could keep these scholars from leaving and increase the output of interdisciplinary work.

Many difficult societal problems will require research that cuts across the lines of established disciplines to solve. Right now, academia rewards scholars who work within disciplinary boundaries and climb the departmental career ladder.

To remedy this issue, universities and funding agencies could create better incentives for collaboration and research that addresses critical problems regardless of the discipline. These changes could create space for interdisciplinary researchers to thrive and become mentors for future generations of scientists.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Bruce Weinberg, The Ohio State University; Enrico Berkes, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Monica Marion, Indiana University, and Staša Milojević, Indiana University

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Bruce Weinberg receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Ewing Marion Kauffman and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations, as well as the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Enrico Berkes received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health while a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University.

Monica Marion has received funding from the National Science Foundation.

Staša Milojević received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.