The impact of the pandemic on early career researchers' work‐life and scholarly communications: A quantitative aerial analysis

• Published in: Learned publishing 2023-04, Vol.36 (2), p.128-140
• Main Authors: Nicholas, David, Herman, Eti, Clark, David, Boukacem‐Zeghmouri, Cherifa, Rodríguez‐Bravo, Blanca, Abrizah, Abdullah, Watkinson, Anthony, Sims, David, 'Świgoń, Marzena, Xu, Jie, Serbina, Galina, Jamali, Hamid R., Tenopir, Carol, Allard, Suzie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Careers; early career researchers; Humanities and Social Sciences; Library and information sciences; pandemic; Pandemics; Researchers; Scholarly communication; scholarly communications; Social sciences; Work life balance
• ISSN: 0953-1513; 1741-4857
• DOI: 10.1002/leap.1541

After two‐years of repeat interviewing early career sciences/social sciences researchers from around the world about their work life and scholarly communications in pandemic‐times, the Harbingers‐2 project is in a position to release quantitative data on the pandemic's overall impact. The data comes from around 50 questions asked in the third and final round of interviews with 147 early career researchers (ECRs), which had a codifiable element to them (such as yes, no, do not know). The 19 scholarly topics covered include: pandemic‐related research; research funding; changes to the workplace/working from home; pandemic‐incurred stress and anxiety; teaching; employment security; career progression; mentoring; assessment (including metrics); collaboration; searching/finding information; ethics; networking; informal communication; publishing; sharing; pre‐prints; outreach; and scholarly transformations. The main findings are that in six broad aspects of ECRs' work‐life and scholarly behaviour, more than 50% of ECRs were impacted by the pandemic, with remote teaching having the greatest impact. By way of comparison, in another six aspects there was little change, least of all when it came to sharing activities. Among the countries studied, Malaysia stood out as being the most impacted, and of the disciplines it was the medical sciences and the soft social sciences most impacted.