A big takeaway I'm getting from these studies is that our collective ability to develop new paradigms and address new challenges really rests on whether we can continuously produce new scientists. If the pipeline of fresh faces slows down, so does progress.
If this is true, then it could pose interesting policy implications. It means that we need to do whatever we can to keep minting new PhDs to work on these problems. But at the same time, we have to be able to put them somewhere after they have graduated. If a field is flooded with new graduates to the point that tenure-track positions are statistically non-viable then it could kill student interest in the field, reduce available funding, and ultimately stall progress in that area.
Another strategy could be to force more senior faculty out of gatekeeping positions earlier. This would be a total non-starter politically, but it would be interesting to see what science would look like if all the journal and grant reviewers were in their first decade of scholarship.
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.
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.
A big takeaway I'm getting from these studies is that our collective ability to develop new paradigms and address new challenges really rests on whether we can continuously produce new scientists. If the pipeline of fresh faces slows down, so does progress.
If this is true, then it could pose interesting policy implications. It means that we need to do whatever we can to keep minting new PhDs to work on these problems. But at the same time, we have to be able to put them somewhere after they have graduated. If a field is flooded with new graduates to the point that tenure-track positions are statistically non-viable then it could kill student interest in the field, reduce available funding, and ultimately stall progress in that area.
Another strategy could be to force more senior faculty out of gatekeeping positions earlier. This would be a total non-starter politically, but it would be interesting to see what science would look like if all the journal and grant reviewers were in their first decade of scholarship.
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.
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.