The 'pivot penalty': Exploring career risks for researchers who don't stay in their own lane 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 "pivot penalty"—their COVID-related work received less attention than previous contributions in their old field—and the greater the pivot, the worse the penalty.
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-....pivot-penalty-explor