The ‘pivot penalty’: Exploring career risks for researchers who don’t stay in their own lane

In 2020, Yian Yin teamed up with economists at Northwestern University to look at the impact of researchers who had shifted their focus to study the COVID pandemic. He saw that these researchers faced a “pivot penalty”—their COVID-related work received less attention than previous contributions in their old field—and the greater the pivot, the worse the penalty.

As Yin and his colleagues continued their analyses, however, they discovered the pivot penalty wasn’t just a side effect of the pandemic. It occurred any time a scientist, inventor, or organization struck out in a new direction instead of staying in their lane.

“This is really a universal pattern that appears very widespread across science and technology—across different fields, research outcomes, career stages, and team sizes,” said Yin, who was then a research fellow at Northwestern, and is now an assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

The resulting study, “The Pivot Penalty in Research,” is published in Nature. Northwestern highlighted the work in the feature “When Experts Pivot, They Pay a Price,” in the Kellogg School of Management publication, the Kellogg Insight.

By looking at almost 26 million research papers and 1.72 million patents—and how often they were referenced by other researchers—the team found the pivot penalty resulted from two potential factors: not having an established reputation in the new field and producing lower quality work as they got up to speed.

Ideally, researchers should be able to bring new ideas to existing fields and shift their work to address new challenges, Yin said, but these efforts may be risky to a person’s career.

“We feel that people need to be aware of these risks as they choose research directions,” said Yin, whose research explores the science of science. “And more importantly, this fundamental constraint on adaptability in science poses new questions for research organizations and policymakers.”

As Yin continues to study this phenomenon, he intends to look at whether pivoting leads to lasting effects, or whether the risk can pay off in the long run as researchers generate innovative new directions.

The study’s findings have also made Yin examine his own research path.

“I’m so grateful for the community and my collaborators,” he said, “because I’m the kind of person who loves pivoting a lot.”

Co-authors on the work include Ryan Hill, Benjamin Jones, Dashun Wang, and Xizhao Wang at Northwestern, and Carolyn Stein of the University of California, Berkeley.