Research topic choice: Motivations, strategies, and consequences

Abstract Scientists’ choices of what research topics to pursue are highly consequential and have been the subject of many studies. However, these studies are dispersed across several fields and literatures. This paper provides a review of this body of work. It first reviews theory from economics and sociology to explain how topic choice fits into scientists’ broader competitive strategy, and how the social valuation of research topics reproduces inequalities in science. Then it examines empirical literature on how research topics are chosen in practice, first looking at observational accounts derived from large-scale secondary data sources, then looking at self-reported accounts elicited by surveys and interviews of researchers. Finally, it concludes with a synthesis of the theoretical and empirical literature and identifies research gaps. Themes in these literatures include the rewards associated with certain topics, demographic differences in topic choices, and whether choices are broadly reward maximizing or driven by social context, identities, and path dependence. We also identify several research gaps, including the types and impacts of costs impeding topic entry and switching, the causal mechanisms associating topics with rewards, and the discrepancy between scientists’ self-reported topic motivations and observed behavior.