What hinders interdisciplinary researchers

Australian study links interdisciplinary careers to temporary contracts, slow career progression, and lower pay

Conceptual illustration of a figure crossing a narrow bridge linking two distinct territories, suggesting the passage between fields of knowledge: surrounding it are rigid structures that evoke institutional barriers.

An academic career tends to follow a predictable pathway, varying only according to the area of research: earn a PhD, publish in prestigious journals, get cited by peers, and, in the best case scenario, secure a permanent position.

Those who choose interdisciplinary research, however, tread a more uncertain path, since many publications are still organized by discipline and institutions do not always support those seeking to cross these boundaries.

A study conducted in Australia investigated how early- and mid-career researchers (EMCRs) build interdisciplinary career paths and how universities help or hinder this process.

A six-year study at two Australian institutes

The authors define EMCRs as a broad group ranging from PhD candidates to researchers with up to ten years of postdoctoral experience.

The data were collected over a six-year period at two Australian institutes, through interviews with 27 EMCRs, dozens of senior academics, university managers and leaders, and observations of meetings and workshops.

The findings are organized into ten themes, grouped in three dimensions (cognitive, organizational, and community), ranging from the pursuit of intellectual purpose to the difficulty of belonging to a new field.

The three dimensions of an interdisciplinary career path

1. Cognitive: the intellectual motivations behind the decision—sense of purpose, curiosity, and desire to create real-world impact
2. Organizational: the institutional and material conditions of a career, such as contracts, career progression, and remuneration.
3. Community: A sense of belonging—the difficulty of being recognized and finding a place in a new field.

Among these three dimensions, the most frequently cited hindrance is the imbalance between the risk borne by researchers and the risk assumed by institutions.

This manifests primarily in material conditions: temporary contracts, slower career progression, and atypical situations that the research system is unable to evaluate or compensate fairly.

One cited case illustrates the problem: leading a project that secured substantial funding, one researcher did not challenge the terms offered because she wasn’t aware she could. Only later did she realize that she was being paid less than her colleagues with less responsibility.

For women, there is an additional layer: they report being mistaken for students and having their authority systematically questioned.

Intellectual motivations underpin the choice

Despite the costs, the strongest reasons for pursuing interdisciplinary research are intellectual: a sense of purpose, curiosity, and the desire to make a real-world impact. Mentors, colleagues, and team members also played a decisive role, especially for those still trying to understand the rules of the game.

The problem, says the study, is that these rules barely change. Across all the dimensions analyzed, the authors identified a misalignment between institutions’ aspirations to promote interdisciplinarity and the support needed to sustain it.

To correct this imbalance, the article advocates redistributing risk between researchers and institutions through measures such as seed funding for interdisciplinary projects, cross-institutional initiatives, and more collaborative processes for research grant applications.

The opposition between disciplinary and interdisciplinary careers, the authors suggest, may be a false dichotomy: most researchers did not abandon their original discipline; they simply added another to it.

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