By C. Brandon Ogbunu
In 2023, I was fortunate to be a member of a team of scientists that investigated how the Covid-19 pandemic influenced the demographics of people incarcerated in the United States. Days after the study was published, an evolutionary biologist colleague offered a (backhanded) compliment, as I recall: I dont even know what this has to do with your area of expertise, but very cool nonetheless. On the same day, I remember receiving a decidedly non-congratulatory note, racist in tone, from a political extremist angry at the allegedly woke nature of the study, essentially asking: What does this have to do with evolutionary biology?
The two responses expressed the same confusion: What did my academic training have to do with the studys area of inquiry in this case, the U.S. prison system? This is a common experience for scientists who dont feel tethered to any particular topic, or at least ones to which we are formally associated. (For me, those areas are computational biology, epidemiology, and population genetics.) Although Ive found these interactions to be mostly humorous and inconsequential, a recent study highlights that there is a formal cost to pivoting, whereby a scientist moves into a research area outside of their own formal expertise. An interdisciplinary team examined about 30 million studies and patents published between 1970 and 2020 and found that scientists who pivoted into different areas incurred a penalty, as measured against several standards, such as how often their papers are referenced in other studies. And the effect was quantitative: Across the scientific literature, papers that were further from the established area of the author (larger average pivots) had systematically lower impact. This study also suggests that the pivot penalty is robust across career stages and subdisciplines, though it does seem to have become more pronounced in recent times that is, we penalize the pivoters of 2020 more than we did the ones in 2010, 2000, etc.
The hypothetical scenario painted by the findings is that however interesting a study might be, we dont read it or trust it if it isnt authored by a name that we recognize, a person who possesses a skill set that we deem appropriate.
To be fair, work done by outsiders attracts a sort of justifiable suspicion. For one, the age of misinformation has made us appropriately skeptical of those who speak with authority on matters for which they are underqualified. Relatedly, the Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias by which we tend to overestimate our competence in an area, and it has become central in todays conversations about expertise. The ability to distinguish real from fake is a very important part of science, so some of this pivot penalty is defensible. If a cell biologist wants to study linguistics, they must recognize that the discipline has a rich history and set of methodologies that must be understood to participate responsibly. So at least part of the pivot penalty can be attributed to the challenge of acquiring expertise. Learning new fields to the level at which we can contribute to them meaningfully is challenging and should be.
However, given the enormous sample of papers analyzed in the pivot penalty study, we should feel confident that it captures a real phenomenon. And if we accept that it is true, two important questions come to mind: What is specifically troublesome about the pivot penalty, and what can we do to address it?
The pivot penalty supports the cynical idea that recognition in the sciences is driven by our professional networks and pedigrees, rather than any essential notion of quality. If we want to gain recognition, the golden key is to work with people who are recognized, in areas where they have a longstanding reputation. And one way to exit an influential network and comfort zone is to enter an unknown one, which happens during many scientific pivots.
Surely not all pivots are penalized. Some scientists have been immensely successful in their attempts to bridge fields and ideas. Historical examples include Erwin Schr�dinger, whose 1944 book What Is Life? is one of the most well-known pivots from physics to biology and widely recognized as a landmark text. Furthermore, terms like bioengineering and systems biology are not only compound words but compound fields that are the product of scientific pivots, where ideas from control theory, mathematical modeling, and other fields were applied to contemporary problems in biology and biomedicine. Many of the most exciting developments in all of science including breakthroughs in single-cell biology, metabolomics, and cancer therapy fall under their umbrellas.
These examples are helpful because they demonstrate that pivoting is a central feature of scientific and technical innovation. But they dont tell the story of the average pivoter. The truth is that the scientific enterprise incentivizes those who dont leave the nest. To be clear, there is plenty of valuable and important science that needs to be done within our classical fields. But however unintentional, the penalty incurred for trying to explore feels deeply anti-intellectual. The willingness to part with assumptions and march into the unknown is not a caricature of the intrepid, often fictional, scientist. Rather, the courage to percolate into new domains is one of sciences most subversive weapons. The modern scientific machine is an embarrassment: It tells those with wanderlust to sit in detention, like a kid who misbehaves in grade school.
What can one do? As with other problems in science, the incentive structure is to blame. For example, what is wrong with scientific publishing? Among many things, its a system that rewards scientists who extract reviewing effort (having others review their work) in excess of their input (reviewing the work of others). Why is exploitation of graduate students and postdocs such a problem? Because principal investigators are incentivized to accumulate young talent and squeeze as many papers and dollars from them as possible.
Encouragingly, many of these problems are not difficult to diagnose, or maybe even fix. If we want to encourage better teaching and service, then we should hire and promote on those grounds. Similarly, if we want to reward intellectual agility, we should explicitly hire and promote with that in mind, or at least consider the pivot penalty when evaluating performance. Because the point is not that pivoting is necessarily better, but rather that it should not be penalized. Scholarly wanderlust is a central part of discovery. Its time that we recognize and amplify creativity and dynamism, even if we dont recognize the scientists name or arent familiar with their academic training.
As American science undergoes disruptions the likes of which it has never seen, the reality is that the entire workforce may have to pivot in one way or another. Whole subfields of inquiry and countless institutions are being defunded. This will compel us to adapt or die. But like many other stress tests, the attacks on science reveal a problem that has existed for a long time: We need more formal means to reward the excessively curious, as they are not only equipped to generate new technical breakthroughs but are also prepared to perform in dark times, when the old models are broken, and creativity is our guiding light.