Exploring career risks for researchers who don’t stay in their own lane

In 2020, Yian Yin teamed up with economists from the Northwestern University to examine the impact of researchers who had put themselves on the cocovio pandemic. He saw that these researchers were faced with a “pivotal penalty” – their covid work received less attention than previous contributions in their old field – the greater the pivot, the greater the penalty.

However, while Yin and his colleagues continued their analyzes, they discovered that the Pivot penalty was not only a side effect of the pandemic. It occurred each time a scientist, an inventor or an organization struck in a new direction instead of staying in his way.

“It is really a universal scheme that seems very widespread in science and technology – different fields, research results, career stages and team sizes,” said Yin, who was then a researcher at Northwestern, and is now an assistant teacher of information sciences at the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

The resulting study, “The Pivot Pinalty in Research”, is published in Nature. Northwestern highlighted the work in the functionality “When experts pivot, they pay a prize”, in the publication of the Kellogg School of Management, the Kellogg Insight.

By examining nearly 26 million research documents and 1.72 million patents – and how often they were referenced by other researchers – the team found that the pivot penalty results from two potential factors: not having a reputation established in the new field and producing lower quality work as they have set up.

Ideally, researchers should be able to provide new ideas in existing fields and move their work to meet new challenges, said Yin, but these efforts can be risky for a person’s career.

“We believe that people must be aware of these risks because they choose research instructions,” said Yin, whose research explores the science of science. “And more importantly, this fundamental constraint on adaptability in science asks new questions for research organizations and decision -makers.”

While the yin continues to study this phenomenon, it intends to examine whether the pivot leads to lasting effects, or whether the risk can be paid in the long term because researchers generate new innovative directions.

The results of the study also made that Yin examine his own research path.

“I am very grateful to the community and my collaborators,” he said, “because I am the kind of person who likes to rotate.”

The work co-authors include Ryan Hill, Benjamin Jones, Dashun Wang and Xizhao Wang in Northwestern and Carolyn Stein from the University of California in Berkeley.