Researcher positions and the emergence of interdisciplinary scientific fields - The case of synthetic biology

Interdisciplinary scientific fields emerge at the intersections of existing disciplines, driving innovations that are well-suited to address grand societal challenges. While the literature generally recognizes the role of individual researchers in advancing these fields, less is known about how the researchers' positions impact the emergence of an interdisciplinary scientific field. Using synthetic biology as a case, this study analyzes publication and research grant data to explore how researchers contribute to and shape these evolutionary processes.
We conceptualize four types of researchers as drivers in the formation of interdisciplinary fields: (1) impactful, (2) innovation-oriented, (3) socially-central, and (4) interdisciplinary researchers. Employing a dynamic partitioning approach based on personal characteristics, and leveraging findings from a random forest regression analysis, we examine how distinct groups and features of researchers contribute to the evolution of synthetic biology.
Our findings indicate that researchers with a background in biological sciences have a higher citation impact on the field and highlight the critical role of early- and mid-career researchers in shaping the field's early innovation potential, as measured by patent citations. Furthermore, our analysis shows that interdisciplinary collaborations are–unsurprisingly-important for an emerging interdisciplinary field, as indicated by researchers' social centrality. However, researchers with more distant academic backgrounds relative to the emerging interdisciplinary scientific field tend to be more interdisciplinary than those with a higher proximity.
These insights advance our understanding of how researchers' positions shape emerging scientific fields, offering insights into which researchers contribute to field formation and enhancing our knowledge of the micro-level dynamics of interdisciplinary scientific field formation.