Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are the worker bees of academia, toiling in labs for years in hopes of one day running their own hive. For the lucky few who get that chance, the moment comes with a dilemma: Is it better to stay close to a former adviser’s research area or to distance yourself?
A new study argues that overlap helps rather than hinders young life scientists — up to a point. Researchers gathered data on more than 11,000 U.S. biomedical scientists trained in labs between 1985 and 2009 and tracked them during the first 10 years after they started independent careers. The authors, who measured research overlap by tracking keywords in published papers, found that a 19% increase in adviser-advisee overlap was associated with a 19% increase in an early-career scientist’s chances of having an R01 grant, the National Institutes of Health’s main award class, in a given year. Increased overlap was also associated with a nearly 15% increase in funding received over 10 years and a 7.4% increase in a researcher’s number of publications.
But closeness can also backfire. Those who continued co-authoring papers with a former adviser after starting independent careers tended to have less funding and fewer papers.
“You don’t need to go off and start your own field,” said Christopher Liu, the study’s corresponding author. “You still at the same time need to signal your independence and your creativity.”
Liu, an associate professor of management at the University of Oregon, studies how organizations function in hopes of helping them work more efficiently. He’s particularly interested in academic science, in part because he holds dual doctorates in biology and business administration. STAT spoke with him to better understand the implications of the study, which has been posted as a preprint and accepted for publication by the journal Organization Science.
One key insight: Science, as high-tech as it has become, “remains an artisan, craft-based industry,” Liu said, and that requires “the transfer of tacit knowledge.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What made you want to study the impact of research overlap on scientists’ careers?
You can think of postdoctoral and graduate training as kind of an apprenticeship. These are transient positions. As people become independent, how they should strategize about their research agenda, where they should plant their flag, are critical questions that almost every new faculty member struggles with.
In general, there’s this argument that there are benefits to being close to the adviser, whether it’s through knowledge transfers, whether it’s through introducing you to people. At the same time, there is a very strong imperative for independence. You don’t want to be overshadowed by this kind of parent figure. As a parent myself, [junior researchers are like] teenagers who need to blossom and become their own person.
There is no, at least in our read, both formally and informally, “right” answer. There’s a lot of lore, a lot of people point down the hall and say, “Ooh, they did it that way. So maybe that’s the way to do it.” So in part, the motivation of this study was to begin trying to collect the data to answer this a little — I would not say definitively, right, but closer to the empirical frontier — than has been done before.
Were you surprised by the findings?
Yes, I was surprised. But we do see that there are boundary conditions to these findings. In my opinion, that kind of affirms the validity of our findings. For example, yes, you can be close to your adviser, but if, after you become independent, you continue to co-author with them, that becomes negative. So it’s not that you should be close to your adviser forever and ever. At some point, you need to find your own set of co-authors and collaborators.
What’s also very cool is that we find this benefit of proximity accentuated for fields where there is less knowledge. Once there’s a lot of published [papers], then you don’t need to be as close to your adviser. Our inference is that what’s going on is that the craft of research is being transferred from the adviser to the advisee.
What do you mean by that?
There’s a lot of knowledge that is not in a paper. Sometimes it’s strategically withheld, but very often it’s just because you can’t write down everything. There’s a lot of skills that are just craft. Science, even in this modern age, remains an artisan, craft-based industry, and a lot of that is the transfer of tacit knowledge.
Anybody can ask a new question, but to ask which questions at this point in time have both impact and are tractable is actually really hard. In some ways, I think that’s why graduate school and postdocs take so long. You’re learning the nuance of the scientific method, how to ask questions, when do you publish, when is the burden of proof established to some degree.
Do you think these findings would hold up if you’d had access to more recent data?
I don’t see any reason to think that science has dramatically changed in the last 10 years. We end the dataset there for technical reasons. But, yes, it should be broadly applicable to the present, to 2026.
The study finds that research overlap is good for junior scientists’ careers, but does that mean that overlap is good for the scientific enterprise?
I would argue so. We’ve known for quite some time that the odds are stacked against junior scholars for various reasons, whether it’s the rising average age of first NIH R01 grant awardees, etc. My intuition is that having a more robust scientific ecosystem, having rejuvenation and having junior scholars who will come out and bring vitality to the field is, in general, a positive thing.
What’s your advice to people in the scientific community, both advisers and advisees?
I don’t want to give blanket advice, but in general, being in a domain adjacent to your adviser is not necessarily bad, especially for new and emerging fields. For advisers, allowing people to take their projects with them, I think, could help their advisees quite a bit.
