Young Geoscientists Reveal the Hidden Costs of Working Across Disciplines

Interdisciplinary research has become the rallying cry of modern science, nowhere more so than in the geosciences, where climate change, sea-level rise, drought, and land degradation refuse to respect the boundaries of any single discipline. Yet a new survey of early career scientists in Germany suggests that while the enthusiasm for crossing disciplinary borders is genuine, the practical machinery to support such work is lagging far behind the rhetoric. The study, published in the journal Geoscience Communication, draws on 151 valid responses from doctoral researchers, postdoctoral scientists, and master’s students within the Geo.X research network that links nine university and non-university institutions across Berlin and Potsdam, one of Germany’s most important clusters of geoscientific research.

The team behind the survey, led by Inge Wiekenkamp of the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences and Jacob Hardt of Freie Universität Berlin, designed a 45-item questionnaire covering how respondents define interdisciplinarity, how extensively they collaborate beyond their own fields, and what benefits and obstacles they encounter. Distributed through the Geo.X early career email list and institutional mailing lists, the survey remained open for roughly four and a half months during the spring and summer of 2024. After filtering responses by academic age, defined as the number of years spent in active research after completing a master’s degree, and removing incomplete entries, the researchers arrived at a final dataset of 151 participants. The sample was dominated by researchers aged 25 to 34, and its employment profile was strikingly precarious: 131 of 137 respondents who answered the relevant question held fixed-term contracts, and the majority were funded through external research grants rather than institutional positions.

One of the study’s most revealing findings concerns how the term interdisciplinarity is actually understood. Asked to name up to three aspects they most strongly associated with the word, participants produced 445 individual entries, which the researchers harmonized into 113 distinct categories. The most frequent associations were collaboration, cited by 44 percent of respondents, multiple disciplines at 36 percent, and different perspectives at 19 percent. Beyond those leading terms, the responses dispersed rapidly into a long tail, with more than half of all aspects mentioned by only a single individual. Notably, explicitly negative associations were almost entirely absent, amounting to just two mentions across the entire corpus. The authors interpret this fragmentation as evidence that interdisciplinarity functions less as a shared concept and more as an umbrella term encompassing widely varying motivations, practices, and expectations.

That ambiguity matters, the researchers argue, because it shapes how cross-disciplinary work is conducted and evaluated. Few respondents spontaneously referred to the integration or synthesis of disciplinary perspectives, which many scholars regard as the defining feature of genuine interdisciplinarity. Instead, most participants appeared to conceptualize the term in terms of collaboration across fields rather than epistemic integration, the deeper merging of concepts and methods into a coherent framework. The finding echoes earlier studies, including work by Cooke and colleagues in 2020, which found that researchers hold views of interdisciplinarity ranging from calling it a meaningless academic buzzword to valuing it as a genuine enrichment of knowledge and problem-solving. For the authors of the new survey, the lesson is clear: if even actively engaged researchers lack a clear conceptual distinction between collaboration and integration, then explicit training in the theory and practice of interdisciplinary work is urgently needed.

The survey also quantified just how extensively early career geoscientists are already collaborating across disciplinary lines. Researchers were asked to classify their collaborators into five broad fields: life sciences, humanities and social sciences, natural sciences, engineering sciences, and other fields. The results, visualized in Sankey diagrams, showed substantial cross-field engagement everywhere, but with notable variation. Among life scientists, 73.1 percent reported collaborating outside their own field, the highest rate in the survey, followed by 67.3 percent in engineering sciences, 61.4 percent in the humanities and social sciences, and 55.2 percent in the natural sciences. Within the natural sciences themselves, the internal interdisciplinarity was equally pronounced: 49 percent of geoscientists collaborated with other natural science disciplines, while the figures climbed to 62.5 percent in chemistry, 71.1 percent in physics, and 80 percent in mathematics.

The authors caution that these self-reported figures should be interpreted carefully. Early career scientists often have limited autonomy in choosing their collaborators, so observed patterns may partly reflect the structural design of large, pre-established projects and consortia rather than individual initiative. The survey also cannot distinguish between multidisciplinary arrangements, in which disciplines work side by side, and fully integrative interdisciplinary collaboration involving conceptual or methodological synthesis. Fields such as the life sciences frequently operate in large teams, which may inflate their apparent rates of cross-field engagement. Still, the broad consistency of the patterns across fields suggests that the survey provides a meaningful snapshot of how deeply cross-disciplinary interaction is now woven into the working lives of young researchers, whether by choice or by circumstance.

When it came to weighing the advantages and disadvantages of interdisciplinary research, participants selected predefined benefits 488 times against 341 selections of drawbacks, an overall positive balance. More than 83 percent of respondents identified three principal advantages: productive exchange with researchers from other fields, an enhanced capacity for solving complex problems, and the opportunity to advance their field with unconventional approaches. By contrast, two strategic benefits fared far less well, with only 21 to 27 percent citing improved funding opportunities or more effective distribution of workload. This gap between intellectual and strategic rewards is telling. It suggests that early career scientists embrace cross-disciplinary work primarily for learning, network building, and the excitement of the most demanding research questions, not because they expect it to advance their careers or ease their burdens.

The disadvantages, meanwhile, were concrete and recurring. The most frequently cited obstacle, selected by 69 percent of respondents, was the use of different terminologies across fields, a communication barrier that can quietly consume hours of meeting time and breed misunderstanding. Nearly half of participants, 48 percent, pointed to differing working speeds between disciplines, which make synchronization difficult, while 42 percent highlighted varying publishing practices that complicate finding common ground for publication. Further challenges included difficulties in data management, cited by 28 percent, and trouble selecting suitable journals for interdisciplinary results, cited by 27 percent. In free-form answers, participants described additional strains: the extra time interdisciplinary coordination demands in an academic life where time is already scarce, the risk of compromising one’s own specialized expertise, and the need to reconcile differing authorship conventions, aims, and geographic work locations. Several respondents noted that communicating across fields lowers research efficiency and requires compromises, and some linked their reluctance to the growing strain on scientific publishing more generally.

These findings carry pointed implications for research policy and funding. The authors argue that enabling interdisciplinary research requires far more than incentives to collaborate; it requires institutions to recognize and reduce the structural disadvantages that early career scientists absorb when working across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Interdisciplinary projects demand additional time for coordination, translation across terminologies and methods, and negotiation of publication strategies, all of which can delay outputs compared with purely disciplinary work. Funding schemes and evaluation practices that implicitly reward speed and discipline-specific publication pathways may therefore discourage exactly the kind of engagement that funders rhetorically champion. Among the practical levers the authors propose are longer project durations, dedicated resources for coordination and facilitation, educational resources on interdisciplinarity and knowledge transfer, and assessment criteria that credit process outputs such as shared protocols, integrated datasets, and co-produced tools alongside traditional publications.

The study also highlights the potential of research networks as engines of interdisciplinary capacity. Geo.X, founded in 2010, integrates institutions including the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, Freie Universität Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the University of Potsdam, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the Alfred Wegener Institute, the German Aerospace Center, and the Museum for Natural History Berlin. Its self-governed early career section, run by doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, emerged directly from discussions at a 2022 science retreat where participants found their experiences of interdisciplinarity varied widely. Network structures, the authors note, are flexible enough to pilot new formats: roughly half of submissions to the Geo.X seed funding programme Grow Your Idea come from early career scientists, and a dedicated community grant supports interdisciplinary workshops, exchanges, and seminars. The broader message is one that resonates far beyond the geosciences: the question is no longer whether researchers need to work across disciplines, but how to make that work easier to do well, by aligning incentives, timeframes, training, and evaluation with the real coordination and integration costs that interdisciplinary science entails. Supporting young scientists in navigating those challenges, the authors conclude, strengthens not only individual careers but the entire scientific ecosystem.

Subject of Research: Experiences and challenges of early career scientists conducting interdisciplinary research in the geosciences

Article Title: Interdisciplinary research in the Geosciences: a view from early career scientists

Article References: Wiekenkamp, I., van Schijndel, V., Hardt, J., Kuppler, J., Glückler, R., Baisheva, I., Yeste, P., Einhäupl, P., Scicchitano, M. R., & Lisovski, S. (2026). Interdisciplinary research in the Geosciences: a view from early career scientists. Geoscience Communication, 9(4), 461-471. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-461-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-461-2026

Keywords: interdisciplinarity, geosciences, early career scientists, Geo.X, survey research, science policy, research funding, cross-disciplinary collaboration, scientific publishing, research networks, Earth system science, academic careers