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Derek Jones's avatar

Researchers prefer to stay within their field for the same reason that companies prefer to stay within their established line of business, i.e., it allows them to maximise return on investment. Some researchers will even stay within a field doing fake research, provided the money and citations keep on rolling in, e.g., http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2021/01/17/software-effort-estimation-is-mostly-fake-research/

New research topics tend to be initially populated by new researchers, or researchers who cannot get funded in an existing field.

There are more researchers than funding. Make the money available, and researchers will beat a path to your door. No need to pay a premium to attract the people who got lucky last time.

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Gianni Giacomelli's avatar

Great read as always. This said, just a thought - branching into another established field is intuitively quite different from building a new (green)field. Also, cross-disciplinary is not the same as antidisciplinary (in the words of Joy Ito). In the case of COVID, one could possibly argue that some of the work was more greenfield than in the past, because we didn’t have a discipline that helped with a concerted response across so many fields? In sum: perhaps the contributions in a completely new discipline can be valued - but perhaps what’s missing is the forum for those contributions to be valued (grant category, journals etc). And yet, innovation is so deeply combinatorial that perhaps an antidisciplinary approach, and related incentives, is important.

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