Early‐career interdisciplinarity and long‐term career impact

Abstract While interdisciplinary research is widely advocated as a response to complex global challenges, how the level of early‐career interdisciplinarity is associated with scientists' long‐term career impact remains less known. Using large‐scale career data from 1.7 million scientists who began their scientific careers between 1980 and 2005, we show that a one‐standard‐deviation increase in early‐career interdisciplinarity is associated with a 0.67% increase in publication counts, a 2.98% increase in citation impact, and a 2.08% increase in highly cited papers over the subsequent 10 years. These results remain robust across alternative settings, measurement choices, and scientist subgroups. We further show that scientists with higher levels of early‐career interdisciplinarity are more likely to explore new research topics over time, and that topic exploration is a potential explanatory pathway for the observed differences in productivity and citation impact. These findings suggest that higher early‐career interdisciplinarity is associated with a broader intellectual search space and stronger long‐term knowledge production. Our study contributes to the quantitative understanding of scientific careers and provides policy‐relevant evidence for funding agencies and research institutions seeking to support early‐career scientists with the capacity to integrate knowledge across disciplinary boundaries.