the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 16 Apr 2026
Interdisciplinary Research in Geosciences: A View from Early Career Scientists
Abstract. Geosciences are often described as interdisciplinary, yet research and training remain fragmented across sub-disciplines and institutions. To understand how early career scientists (ECS) experience and practice interdisciplinarity, and which support structures actually help, we conducted an online survey within the German Geo.X research network. This yielded 151 valid responses that were included in the analysis. Participants broadly value interdisciplinarity for fostering the exchange of ideas across disciplines, providing novel perspectives, and enhancing their capacity to address complex problems. At the same time, they report recurrent barriers that directly affect research efficiency and career progression, including incompatible terminologies, different working speeds, and diverging publication strategies. The results indicate that strengthening interdisciplinary geosciences requires not only incentives for collaboration, but also training in cross-disciplinary communication, and transparent publication and evaluation pathways that acknowledge the increasing coordination efforts. Research networks such as Geo.X provide a strong foundation for initiating advancing interdisciplinary collaboration and can serve as effective instruments. Network structures are particularly well-suited to this purpose, as they are flexible enough to test new formats and innovative ideas as pilot projects. This requires that their initiatives are clearly communicated, easily accessible, and well aligned with the working realities of early career scientists, while also reducing coordination costs by fostering continuity, shared reference frames, and trust across sub-disciplines.
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Status: open (until 19 Jun 2026)
- RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2026-1858', Anonymous Referee #1, 02 Jun 2026 reply
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I enjoyed reading this paper and thank the authors for their work. The authors report on a survey within the German Geo.X research network which aimed to understand facets of interdisciplinary working in the geosciences. It is a very interesting and well-written article, which makes a valuable contribution particularly in identifying ways in which early career scientists would benefit from support in interdisciplinary working and exploring the complexities of interdisciplinarity (and cross-disciplinary working more generally). The approach and methods used are valid and are described clearly and in detail. The paper’s conclusions follow on appropriately from the results presented and are discussed in the context of relevant literature. Appropriate figures are used to present the results and the paper is appropriately structured.
I would recommend publication, subject to the minor corrections suggested below.
Title: should there be a ‘the’ before ‘Geosciences’? Later on line 32 ‘the geosciences’ is used.
Abstract:
Line 25: rephrase ‘the increasing coordination efforts’ to ‘the increasing efforts to coordinate interdisciplinary work’ or similar.
Line 26: add ‘and’ after ‘initiating’?
Figure 1: Should ‘sectorial’ be ‘sectoral’? Would it be possible to give some examples of the ‘hybrid fields’ noted here?
Line 55: Would it be worth adding ‘physical geography’ or ‘geography’ after ‘Earth Sciences’ here? In the UK, at least, man if not all of the disciplines would be grouped in geography departments.
Line 72: Add a definition of early career scientists here.
Line 74: Specify when the retreat took place.
Line 81: delete ‘where we intend’.
Line 84: replace ‘interdisciplinary’ with ‘in interdisciplinary ways’ or similar.
Line 103: Rephrase start of sentence to ‘Data collection and processing…’
Lines 112-113: How does academic age relate to the definition of ECS?
Line 258-260: This is an important point – would you then expect more interdisciplinary collaboration by established researchers because they have more control over the nature of their projects?
Line 357: add ‘with’ after ‘ECS.’