{"id":216636,"date":"2025-06-26T01:21:40","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T06:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/the-pivot-penalty-exploring-career-risks-for-researchers-who-dont-stay-in-their-own-lane"},"modified":"2025-06-26T01:21:40","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T06:21:40","slug":"the-pivot-penalty-exploring-career-risks-for-researchers-who-dont-stay-in-their-own-lane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/the-pivot-penalty-exploring-career-risks-for-researchers-who-dont-stay-in-their-own-lane","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018pivot penalty\u2019: Exploring career risks for researchers who don\u2019t stay in their own lane"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-pivot-penalty-exploring-career-risks-for-researchers-who-dont-stay-in-their-own-lane.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In 2020, Yian Yin teamed up with economists at Northwestern University to look at the impact of researchers who had shifted their focus to study the COVID pandemic. He saw that these researchers faced a \u201cpivot penalty\u201d\u2014their COVID-related work received less attention than previous contributions in their old field\u2014and the greater the pivot, the worse the penalty.<\/p>\n<p>As Yin and his colleagues continued their analyses, however, they discovered the pivot penalty wasn\u2019t just a side effect of the pandemic. It occurred any time a scientist, inventor, or organization struck out in a new direction instead of staying in their lane.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is really a universal pattern that appears very widespread across science and technology\u2014across different fields, research outcomes, <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/career+stages\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">career stages<\/a>, and team sizes,\u201d said Yin, who was then a research fellow at Northwestern, and is now an assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2020, Yian Yin teamed up with economists at Northwestern University to look at the impact of researchers who had shifted their focus to study the COVID pandemic. He saw that these researchers faced a \u201cpivot penalty\u201d\u2014their COVID-related work received less attention than previous contributions in their old field\u2014and the greater the pivot, the worse [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216636\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}