211 General Discussion not mean a lack of understanding but simply different backgrounds and education. It might be helpful to provide basic introductions to each field language and jargon at the beginning of the interdisciplinary initiative so that the lack of ability to speak each other’s language does not undermine the researcher’s self-confidence and commitment towards research. The third challenge relates to expectations of collaborations and co-authorship and is strictly connected to the fourth challenge, which relates to publishing interdisciplinary research. Health sciences collaborations are hierarchical and often consist of large teams and long lists of co-authors often organised by seniority and not by the amount of time and effort put into the collaboration. In applied economics, at least according to my experience, teams are smaller and much more balanced regarding research contributions. On the other hand, there are limitations to the number of collaborators and different levels of contributions due to the institutional incentives to keep short co-author lists. To ease the burden of bridging these two realities, interdisciplinary teams must discuss, a priori and explicitly, the ways of working, expected contributions, and type of journals to be targeted, among other specificities. To the latter point, at least in the case of public health and health economics, there are limited journals where interdisciplinary research can be effectively published. The choice of “each side” will imply essentially different manuscript length requirements, distinct narrative flows for the introduction and discussion, details expected on the methods and robustness analyses, and ways of describing results. In a genuinely interdisciplinary trajectory, the researcher will reach the end of it being able to collaborate in entirely different manners and writing very different publication styles. Naturally, the time invested to gain these skills prevents interdisciplinary researchers from producing the same output that would otherwise be achieved in a single field trajectory. The fifth and last challenge relates to career prospects. Again, this learning is shaped by the particularities of health sciences and economics fields. The first expects their junior researcher to finish a PhD with 3 to 5 published papers and move to post-doctoral position funded by senior researchers projects through soft-funding. The following career step would usually aim at acquiring one’s funding through the start of career grants. In economics, the success of a PhD trajectory is often measured by a single-author piece of work that can bring the researcher to a successful job market experience, in which the best possible outcome is to secure a tenured assistant professor position straight after the PhD The most challenging aspect of these differences is choosing which path to follow early in the PhD trajectory and before properly experiencing the disciplines. In this case, and while more flexible career pathways are not created to accommodate interdisciplinary researchers, it is important to openly discuss this choice and its implications in the early PhD phase. 7
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