Scientists’ fields evolve over careers, new scale shows
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Researchers at Rice University and Michigan State University developed a new way to measure how scientists’ connections to their original academic fields change throughout their careers.
Gina Pizzo and Aaron McCright created a five-dimensional “Disciplinarity Scale” to track how closely a scientist’s current work aligns with the field of their doctorate. They tested the scale using data from over 4,100 science faculty at 83 U.S. research universities.
Previous methods of categorizing scientists relied on their degree field, department, or self-identified discipline, but Pizzo and McCright discovered these approaches often overlooked important variations among researchers within the same field. Their scale considers five aspects of a scientist’s professional life, department, professional association, publishing outlets, peer perception, and self-identification, to determine how strongly they remain connected to their original discipline.
The study revealed that scientists generally show broader disciplinary affiliations the longer they are out of graduate school, and this effect is amplified by experience with cross-disciplinary research. While approximately 16.6% of scientists reported working in a different discipline than their doctorate, the scale also showed variations among those who stayed within their original field.
Pizzo and McCright suggest that combining traditional disciplinary categories with this new scale will give researchers a more accurate understanding of scientists’ backgrounds and how those backgrounds influence their work.
