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) a

SUBMITTER: Unger S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9246137 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature