Changes of research direction in scientific careers are related to the so-called “essential tension” between the exploration of new knowledge and the exploitation of established knowledge in research and innovation. Changes of research direction are thereby assumed to influence the evolution of science in general. Research has shown that such changes may also affect the success of individual scientists in their careers. However, the gender dimension of this aspect of career development is so far understudied. There is also a need for more dynamic indicators to record and interpret career developments in macro data. This study combines the gender perspective with the introduction of new indicators. We selected more than 29,000 scientists in Physics & Astronomy and studied them over six decades using a bibliographic data set from Scopus. We find that women are less likely to change research direction than their men counterparts, and that the research performance of women is less negatively affected by changing research direction. We discuss the policy implications of these findings as well as the methodological advancement related to the new indicators of career development.

Some studies have shown that women undertake interdisciplinary research more than men, whereas other studies have shown no difference by gender. Women have also been shown to self-cite less often than men, a difference at least partly mediated through differences in career stages and prior productivity. Existing evidence on gender-based differences in interdisciplinarity may therefore be biased. If interdisciplinarity is inferred from the disciplinary diversity of a paper’s cited references, a greater share of self-citations by men could decrease their measured interdisciplinarity relative to women. Such biases could lead to erroneous conclusions, because after correcting for self-citations one might uncover that women participate in interdisciplinary research equally to, or less than, men. Given that funding for interdisciplinary research is gaining in importance, obtaining accurate measurements of interdisciplinarity by gender is highly relevant for funders so that they can take appropriate action(s) in leveling the playing field across gender. For instance, evidence suggests women are sometimes advised not to participate in interdisciplinary research due to the risk it represents for their career progression. This study shows that a paper’s interdisciplinarity increases with the presence of female authors, accounting or not for self-citations in the interdisciplinarity measurement.

Cross-disciplinary research (multi-/interdisciplinarity) is incentivized by funding agencies to foster research outcomes addressing complex societal challenges. This study focuses on the link between cross-disciplinary research and its uptake in a broad set of policy-related documents. Using the new policy-oriented database Overton, matched to Scopus, logistic regression was used in assessing this relationship in publications from FP7- and H2020-supported projects. Cross-disciplinary research was captured through two lenses at the paper level, namely from the disciplinary diversity of contributing authors (DDA) and of cited references (DDR). DDA increased the likelihood that publications were cited in policy documents, with DDR possibly making a contribution, but only when publications result from the work of few authors. Citations to publications captured by Overton were found to originate in scientific advice documents, rather than in legislative or executive records. Our approach enables testing in a general way the assumption underlying many funding programs, namely that cross-disciplinary research will increase the policy relevance of research outcomes. Findings suggest that research assessments could benefit from measuring uptake in policy-related literature, following additional characterization of the Overton database; of the science-policy interactions it captures; and of the contribution of these interactions within the larger policymaking process.