Female early-career scientists have conducted less interdisciplinary research in the past six decades: evidence from doctoral theses

Early-career scientists and interdisciplinary research

Existing literature suggests that IDR can benefit scientists’ career advancement in the mid to long term, as it has the potential to foster scientific breakthroughs and lead to greater impact (Chen et al., 2015; Larivière et al., 2015; Okamura, 2019). Extensive empirical studies suggest that novel inventions often emerge from the combination of disparate knowledge domains (Fleming, 2001; Schilling and Green, 2011). Recent studies have shown that interdisciplinary publications tend to attract more citations (Zhang et al., 2021) and…