Slow convergence: Career impediments to interdisciplinary biomedical research.

Despite the long-standing calls for increased levels of interdisciplinary research as a way to address society's grand challenges, most science is still disciplinary. To understand the slow rate of convergence to more interdisciplinary research, we examine 154,021 researchers who received a PhD in a biomedical field between 1970 and 2013, measuring the interdisciplinarity of their articles using the disciplinary composition of references. We provide a range of evidence that interdisciplinary research is impactful, but that those who conduct it face early career impediments. The researchers who are initially the most interdisciplinary tend to stop publishing earlier in their careers-it takes about 8 y for half of the researchers in the top percentile in terms of initial interdisciplinarity to stop publishing, compared to more than 20 y for moderately interdisciplinary researchers (10th to 75th percentiles). Moreover, perhaps in response to career challenges, initially interdisciplinary researchers on average decrease their interdisciplinarity over time. These forces reduce the stock of interdisciplinary researchers who can train future cohorts. Indeed, new graduates tend to be less interdisciplinary than the stock of active researchers. We show that interdisciplinarity does increase over time despite these dampening forces because initially disciplinary researchers become more interdisciplinary as their careers progress.

Non-White scientists appear on fewer editorial boards, spend more time under review, and receive fewer citations.

Disparities continue to pose major challenges in various aspects of science. One such aspect is editorial board composition, which has been shown to exhibit racial and geographical disparities. However, the literature on this subject lacks longitudinal studies quantifying the degree to which the racial composition of editors reflects that of scientists. Other aspects that may exhibit racial disparities include the time spent between the submission and acceptance of a manuscript and the number of citations a paper receives relative to textually similar papers, but these have not been studied to date. To fill this gap, we compile a dataset of 1,000,000 papers published between 2001 and 2020 by six publishers, while identifying the handling editor of each paper. Using this dataset, we show that most countries in Asia, Africa, and South America (where the majority of the population is ethnically non-White) have fewer editors than would be expected based on their share of authorship. Focusing on US-based scientists reveals Black as the most underrepresented race. In terms of acceptance delay, we find, again, that papers from Asia, Africa, and South America spend more time compared to other papers published in the same journal and the same year. Regression analysis of US-based papers reveals that Black authors suffer from the greatest delay. Finally, by analyzing citation rates of US-based papers, we find that Black and Hispanic scientists receive significantly fewer citations compared to White ones doing similar research. Taken together, these findings highlight significant challenges facing non-White scientists.