The research team, spearheaded by Gina Pizzo, a lecturer in Rice University’s Department of Statistics, and Aaron McCright, professor of sociology at Michigan State University, developed and validated a new way to measure what they call disciplinarity. The concept refers to the extent to which scientists remain closely connected to the core of the discipline in which they trained, or instead move toward its boundaries and beyond over the course of their careers. Rather than treating disciplinary affiliation as a fixed attribute, the new approach treats it as a continuum that can shift as research questions, collaborators and professional communities evolve. The measure was tested using survey responses from 4,113 tenure-system science faculty members at 83 U.S. research universities, and the co-author team also included Chad Gonnerman of the University of Southern Indiana, Troy Hall of Oregon State University, Kathryn Plaisance of the University of Waterloo and Brian Robinson of Texas A&M University-Kingsville.

Scientists don’t necessarily stay in the same intellectual box throughout their careers, Pizzo explained. Their research questions, collaborators and professional communities can change considerably, and the team wanted a way to capture that evolution rather than relying on a single disciplinary label. The motivation for the work grew out of a persistent methodological problem in the social studies of science. Researchers who survey scientists have long grouped them by characteristics such as the field of their highest degree, their academic department or the discipline with which they identify. But Pizzo and McCright found that such approaches often miss important differences among scientists who technically belong to the same field. Their review of previous surveys revealed that disciplinary affiliation has frequently been measured using only one or two indicators, a practice that can obscure the ways scientists’ careers diverge as they collaborate across fields or shift the focus of their research.

To close that gap, the researchers created a five-dimensional Disciplinarity Scale. The instrument is anchored to a scientist’s doctoral discipline and measures how closely five aspects of the scientist’s current professional life still align with that original field. Those dimensions include the scientist’s current department, primary professional association, publishing outlets, how their peers perceive their discipline and how they identify themselves. Taken together, the five measures place scientists along a continuum that runs from strong connection to a discipline’s core to broader association with its frontier or even beyond it. The design reflects a conceptual stance that McCright summarized succinctly: academic disciplines are useful categories, but they aren’t impermeable containers. The scale does not discard disciplines; instead, it quantifies the degree to which an individual scientist’s working life remains tethered to one.

The empirical findings lend strong support to the idea that disciplinary affiliation is plastic rather than permanent. The researchers found that scientists tended to have broader disciplinary affiliations the longer they had been out of graduate school, suggesting that careers naturally pull scholars away from the intellectual center of their training over time. The association was even stronger among scientists with more experience conducting cross-disciplinary research. Cross-disciplinary research experience was especially strongly associated with broader disciplinarity, Pizzo noted. When scientists repeatedly work with people who ask different questions, use different methods or publish in different places, those experiences can gradually reshape where they fit within science. In other words, interdisciplinarity is not merely a style of work; it appears to leave a measurable imprint on how scientists locate themselves within the broader landscape of academic fields.

The scale also proved capable of identifying scientists who had formally moved into a different discipline altogether. Among the survey respondents, about 16.6 percent reported a current discipline different from that of their doctorate, while roughly 83 percent remained within their original nominal discipline. Yet even among the scientists who had not formally changed fields, the new measure revealed meaningful differences in how closely their current work remained tied to their original discipline. Two faculty members might both be counted as physicists in a conventional survey, but one could be working near the traditional core of physics while the other operates largely at the boundary with climate science or materials science. Under older measurement approaches, those two scientists would be treated as equivalent. The new scale makes the distinction visible, and that distinction could matter for researchers who study how scientists’ backgrounds influence their views, behaviors or approaches to research.

The implications extend well beyond the sociology of science. Universities and funding agencies increasingly encourage interdisciplinary research aimed at problems that do not fit neatly within a single field, from climate change to emerging technologies to public health. If administrators, funders and scholars rely solely on doctoral discipline to characterize the scientific workforce, they risk drawing inaccurate pictures of who is actually equipped to tackle such problems and how expertise is distributed. Pizzo and McCright argue that future surveys could pair conventional disciplinary categories with the new scale, allowing researchers to capture both where scientists began their careers and how their disciplinary affiliation has evolved since. Such a paired approach would preserve the organizational utility of disciplines while adding a layer of nuance that reflects the increasingly fluid reality of scientific work.

Technically, the study contributes a validated instrument to a field that has often relied on ad hoc classification. By grounding the scale in the doctoral discipline and then systematically comparing five independent markers of current affiliation, the researchers created a measure that can detect gradations of disciplinarity rather than forcing scientists into binary categories such as disciplinary versus interdisciplinary. The validation across more than four thousand faculty members at a large number of research universities gives the instrument empirical weight, and the consistency of its central findings, that time since graduate school and cross-disciplinary experience both predict broader disciplinarity, suggests the construct captures something real about career trajectories in academic science. The work also demonstrates how survey-based measurement can be refined when existing indicators prove too coarse for the phenomena they are meant to describe.

The study’s authors are careful to frame their contribution as a refinement rather than a rejection of traditional categories. We’re not arguing that disciplines no longer matter, McCright said. They remain fundamental to how science is organized. But if we want to understand scientists accurately, we also need to account for the ways their relationship to those disciplines can change over time. In an era when the most pressing scientific questions increasingly demand collaboration across fields, the ability to measure precisely how far a scientist has traveled from the core of her training may become an essential tool for understanding, and supporting, the modern scientific workforce. The physicist who became a climate scientist is no longer an anomaly; with the new Disciplinarity Scale, she is finally a measurable and well-understood feature of the scientific landscape.

Subject of Research: A validated five-dimensional measure of how scientists' disciplinary affiliation changes relative to their doctoral discipline over the course of their careers.

Article Title: New measure captures how scientists’ identities shift across academic disciplines

Article References: New measure captures how scientists’ identities shift across academic disciplines. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: disciplinarity, interdisciplinary research, scientists, doctoral discipline, Rice University, Michigan State University, PLOS One, academic careers, survey research, scientific workforce, disciplinary affiliation, sociology of science

The study found that around one-third of researchers stop publishing within five years of their first paper, and nearly half have left science by the ten-year mark. This large-scale analysis, led by Marek Kwiek from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, sheds light on a global trend that, until now, had been poorly quantified. “We’ve long known that scientists leave academia, but this study shows just how widespread the issue is,” Kwiek said.

Joya Misra, a sociologist from the University of Massachusetts Amherst who focuses on academic inequality, stressed that the findings are a wake-up call. “This study gives us concrete numbers that make it clear there’s a serious retention problem in science,” she explained.

The research followed two distinct groups of scientists: those who began their publishing careers in 2000 and those who started in 2010. In the 2000 cohort, one-third of scientists had already stopped publishing within five years, and by 2019, only about 34% of men and 29% of women were still publishing. The 2010 group showed a slight improvement, with around 42% of both men and women still actively publishing after nine years, suggesting some progress in retaining researchers.

However, significant disparities remain, particularly between genders and across disciplines. Women were generally more likely to exit the research field than men, especially in life sciences. In biology, for instance, 58% of women had left science within ten years, compared to 49% of men. On the other hand, in fields such as physics, engineering, and computer science—where women are often underrepresented—there was little difference between the dropout rates of men and women.

Misra pointed out that these figures may not fully reflect the gender gap in science. “There’s still a bias in how contributions are credited, and women’s roles in collaborative projects might be underrecognized,” she noted. The study doesn’t address why so many scientists leave academia, but potential reasons include a shift toward non-research roles, industry jobs, or administrative positions, as well as personal factors like family commitments and salary concerns.

Previous research by Damani White-Lewis, an expert in academic careers at the University of Pennsylvania, found that family obligations, tenure pressures, and salary dissatisfaction were major reasons why U.S. faculty members left academia. He welcomed the study’s findings but emphasized that more detailed research is needed to understand the motivations behind these departures. “Knowing where the gaps are is the first step toward fixing them,” White-Lewis said.

Kwiek plans to follow up with large-scale surveys and AI-driven interviews to dig deeper into the reasons behind this scientific exodus. Both Misra and White-Lewis agree that understanding why researchers leave is key to developing strategies to retain talent in academia. As White-Lewis put it, “If we want to keep people in science, we need to understand why they’re leaving.”

References:

Kwiek, M., & Misra, J. (2024). Why nearly half of scientists leave academia by their tenth year. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03222-7