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 humans first landed on the Moon in 1969, Neil Armstrong’s first steps marked the realization of a century-old vision integrating diverse scientific fields. Landing on the Moon required expertise in electrical, mechanical, chemical and computer engineering, as well as astronomy and physics.
Likewise, the advances in genetics that made the biotechnology revolution possible involved the contribution of disciplines as diverse as biology, mathematics and statistics, chemistry and computer science.
Today, some of the biggest challenges facing scientists are interdisciplinary in nature – from studying the effects of climate change to managing generative artificial intelligence.
Climate change is not just an environmental problem, just as the impact of AI is not just technological. Scientists from various disciplines can independently find ways to examine these questions, but as research has shown, the most effective approaches often integrate multiple fields.
Our own interdisciplinary team of researchers in economics and computer science – itself an interdisciplinary field focused on technology, information, and people – explored the professional obstacles faced by many interdisciplinary researchers in a study published in July 2024. We investigated how these challenges affect their careers and the production of interdisciplinary research.
Infrastructure and interdisciplinary work
Government and private funders have established programs to support interdisciplinary work. Universities promote interdisciplinary research through joint appointments, simultaneous hiring of multiple professors, centers spanning multiple disciplines, and graduate programs bringing together different fields.
Through these efforts, high demand and exceptional career outcomes for interdisciplinary researchers can be expected. However, this does not appear to be the case. The American university system is still very much dominated by academic disciplines and departments. A researcher whose work does not clearly fit into a category can easily fall through the cracks.
The structure of distinct disciplines and departments is deeply embedded in universities. Many researchers have difficulty finding a journal willing to publish interdisciplinary articles or a department willing to offer interdisciplinary courses. Students interested in this work have difficulty finding mentors.
When interdisciplinary researchers apply for employment, promotion, or tenure, hiring committees composed of members from only one discipline may have difficulty evaluating their work. This problem can put these researchers at a disadvantage compared to candidates from more traditional backgrounds.
Centers, institutes and interdisciplinary programs are often less permanent structures than departments. Sometimes they are designed as solutions to fill gaps between work done in different departments or to solve real-world problems. These centers constitute a sort of frontier: they can attract scientists, particularly established ones, who wish to identify and focus on new research problems. But they are generally not designed to support scientists’ careers in the long term.
Career challenges
Our 2024 study focused on biomedical research, which can benefit from an interdisciplinary approach due to the complexity of biological processes and human behavior.
To begin, we wanted to understand whether researchers with an interdisciplinary background had a longer career publishing their research than those who did not. The results were striking.
Interdisciplinary researchers stopped publishing much earlier than researchers who stuck to a single discipline. The most interdisciplinary researchers – those whose work draws most heavily on other disciplines beyond their primary field – have 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 graduating. Moderately interdisciplinary and unidisciplinary researchers have continued to publish for over 20 years.
Many interdisciplinary researchers left academia early in their careers, when most researchers move into faculty positions and begin to be promoted or gain tenure.
Many researchers who leave do important work in industry and other sectors. However, the high attrition rate of these biomedical researchers means that few senior scientists remain in academia to conduct interdisciplinary research or train future interdisciplinary researchers.
Researchers who started from an interdisciplinary perspective tend to focus more on one discipline early in their careers, as if recognizing that disciplinary work is the easiest path to success.
However, we also found that over the 40-year period examined by our study, biomedical research has become more interdisciplinary overall. Ironically, it was monodisciplinary researchers, whose interdisciplinary work tended to be of lower quality, who drove this growth, becoming increasingly interdisciplinary as their careers progressed.
But our study found that these researchers generally did not have specialized training in interdisciplinary research. They may have become more interdisciplinary through collaborations with researchers in other fields.
Thus, although the overall level of interdisciplinarity in the field has increased, trained interdisciplinary researchers have left academia, and it has been monodisciplinary researchers without the same training who have conducted most of the interdisciplinary work.
Implications for research
Our results indicate another striking trend: researchers who enter the research community tend to be less interdisciplinary than those who are already part of it.
Studies have shown that early-career researchers often do the most innovative work. But at this formative stage in their careers, they don’t apply their talents to interdisciplinary work as often.
While many in the academic community say they want more interdisciplinary research, the new, more discipline-focused researchers joining the system are not leading this work.
Our analysis suggests that finding ways for universities, departments, and funders to support early-career interdisciplinary researchers could prevent these researchers from leaving and increase the production of interdisciplinary work.
Many difficult societal problems will require research that transcends established disciplines to solve. Currently, academia rewards scholars who work within the confines of a discipline and move up the departmental career ladder.
To address this problem, universities and funding agencies could create better incentives for collaboration and research that addresses critical problems, regardless of discipline. These changes could create space for interdisciplinary researchers to flourish and become mentors for future generations of scientists.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization that brings you trusted facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Bruce Weinberg, The Ohio State University; Enrico Berkès, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Monique Marion, Indiana Universityand Staša Milojević, I wrote a children’s play about integrating the arts into STEM fields – here’s what I learned about how to encourage creative, interdisciplinary thinking
Do you want to solve the world’s problems? Try to work together across disciplinesNew England stone walls lie at the intersection of history, archaeology, ecology, and geoscience and deserve their own science.
Bruce Weinberg receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Ewing Marion Kauffman and Alfred P. Sloan foundations, and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Enrico Berkes received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health while he was a postdoctoral researcher at 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.
